


streams and side alleys

by thecapn



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Alternate Universe, Cussing, Lies of Omission, M/M, POV Outsider, Pining, Raised Apart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:20:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 55,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28419027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecapn/pseuds/thecapn
Summary: AU. Dean grows up in the backseat of a 1967 Chevy Impala. Sam grows up in foster care.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 48
Kudos: 151





	1. Henryetta, OK

**Author's Note:**

> This story would not have been possible without the gracious editing and insight from @dimpleforyourthoughts. Thank you for continuing to check in with encouragement and inspiration.

Dean Winchester is seventeen years old and crammed into the narrow cavity between the fire escape staircase and the raw brick wall of an apartment complex in Rochester, New York. He’s dressed in dark colors, a black wool cap pulled low over his forehead and the tips of his ears as he does his best impression of a shadow. 

There are three gouges carved out of the right side of his shoulder that still twinge days after the fact, throbbing as Dean crushes himself as close as he can to the cool texture of the building. His right eye had been nearly swollen shut this time last week, but all that’s left are inky purples sunk deeply into the lower curve of his eye socket, sickly yellows down his cheek. His nose is still puffy and tender, scabbed over the bridge and under the curl of his nostril. Every breath he takes aches in his sinuses and in his ribs. 

The world is round but that does not mean that there are no edges to the map. Dean Winchester has been to the corners, the fragile precipices and sinking mud along the blurry horizons. The parts of the globe that should be labelled ‘Here There Be Monsters’ are the boggy marshlands ringing Louisiana, the vacuous spaces underneath children’s beds.

He tracks the slithering line that their 1967 Chevy Impala carves through the circulatory system of the nation, the veins that pump the infrastructure into the farthest limbs, the deepest organs. Dean has spent years with his face pressed up against the back window of the car, fogging up the glass with his hot breath while he tries to read the road signs as quickly as they pass them. He whips between mile markers and the densely folded pages of the road atlas he keeps under the back seat. 

The only trace the Winchesters leave anywhere are the red circles that Dean pens down behind them - marks one down for the abandoned pasture between Topeka and Denver on I80 where John teaches him how to shoot a bottle off a fence - another between the chords of I90 and I88 right before they finally crush into Chicago, where Dean first puts his first aid training into practice by planting a row of sutures into a bite mark on his father’s calf muscle - another along the flat line of I412 where the Ozarks begin to drain away and the grasslands take root, where something nameless, wretched, and inhuman waited in shallow waters for small children to stray too closely before Dean finds it first. 

If he spreads that atlas out as wide as it goes the map blankets the length of a standard full sized bed. The dots connect in an erratic, irregular spiral and looking at it from above is the only way that Dean can see that anything he’s done ever even happened at all. 

There’s a running calculation on the margin of that map - a string of numbers that rings around and in between the names of coastal towns. He does it for fun most of the time, a way to kill the hours that his father spends listening to the radio at a low volume as they pass through rural counties with four-digit populations. There is a finite amount of distance in between those red circles and Rochester, New York. 

That’s how he knew that the trip from the motel where his father ditched him ‘to heal up’ in Columbus was just under four hundred miles and six hours away from this particular fire escape. 

He’d thought about not coming here for the exact amount of time it took him to hang a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door handle and liberate an - admittedly nice - Volkswagen Golf. 

There’s a cold, dry chill on the air that’s chased most everyone inside. It numbs the sounds of the trashmen clambering loudly the next road over, finally enroute now that the snow plows have pushed through the neighborhoods. It’s been at least an hour since his toes went numb, crammed too tight against the walls of last year’s boots. Time slips by like molasses around him, measured in the shrinking snow piles dripping off the rooftops and the peachy tones swelling in the sky from the west.

Dean practices his breathing, practices  _ his patience  _ the way his father always asks of him. 

The farther that they get away from Rochester the harder it is. 

A clattering from inside the apartment cuts Dean’s attention and shakes a sharp inhale stiffly out of him. There’s a key turning in a lock followed shortly by the light, sharp steps of Vera Petrov.

Dean settles deeper into his crouch, body aching and shoulder screaming as he chases that last impossible degree of invisibility. 

“Sam,” she leans back into the hallway, calls down the staircase in a voice thick with Slavic pronunciations; “It is better to make two trips with bags than to spill groceries!”

“I’ve got it!” 

Through the doorway of the smaller of the two bedrooms, into the entry hall and from there, just a far-off shred of front door; if Dean cranes his head and stretches his rigid neck just enough he can see. 

One hazel eye and a windburnt cheek, his nose, the sweep of hair over his forehead, a dimple is all there is for the one instant. 

Dean ducks back down behind the window’s ledge. Underneath his bruised ribs his heart is pounding.

It’s been ten months since the last time he saw Sam, that time through an ivy-twisted chain link fence across a parking lot. It had been even colder then, Sam buried in a parka that was too oversized to be new and a scarf piled up high around his ears. It had just been the cherry tip of his nose then, a bright light shining from the back of his eyes. Dean had a puncture wound in his thigh that time, was hobbling along on one crutch and had to make sure to give a wide berth so he couldn’t make an impression. 

Padding footsteps in the hallway. 

By the time Sam flips the lightswitch in the bedroom Dean is gone. 

-

Dean Winchester is eight years old and the red chevelle in his hand has been with him since before the fire. The paint is chipping along the fender and around the wheel wells, revealing the cold metal underneath and when he grinds the back wheels down into the pavement, drags it backwards, there’s some internal mechanism that twists up tight. The toy car zips away when he lifts his hand, propels and swerves a few feet away to knock against Sam’s little green sneaker. 

The trick usually gets at least a giggle, should be enough to distract the three year old for a few minutes.

Sammy just sniffs miserably with his ear pressed all the way down to his shoulder. 

It’s been two days since the last time Sam spoke aloud. 

Dean frets at his lip and glances again up the slate of asphalt, to the two figures cut against the sunrise. 

That first morning, Dean thought it was the worst then. He woke up with Sam already in his bed, tucked up so close against his ribs he could feel the unusual fever heat radiating off of him before even seeing his face. Weeping, weak and silent, Sammy just looked up with glazed eyes and refused to answer any of Dean’s increasingly pleading questions.

It was a few baby aspirin and a few more hours of Sam clutching at his ear and Dean’s shirts until Dad cut whatever it was they’re doing in town short. He muttered about dead leads as he checked over their packs to make sure nothing would be forgotten in the rental when they finally left West Virginia for good. 

Dean had watched the night through the windows as they drove, Sam sleeping and weeping in hour long swings the entire road to upstate New York. 

He crawls the short distance to sit with Sam in the long shadow of the Impala, texture of the blacktop printed into his knees from kneeling. There’s a murmur, the churn of a whimper when Dean pulls him in close. It’s hard not to feel impatient glancing back again to Dad and one of his new ‘old friends,’ Caleb. 

They shuffle a stack of something that looks like driver's licenses back and forth, muttering low. He overhears, “back later this afternoon.” 

Sam hadn’t woken up well that morning either. Dean was  _ sure _ it was the worst, then. Wherever the pain was coming form, it wasn’t getting better. He started up again immediately with the pathetic, silent sobbing as soon as he blinked himself awake. Gasping, hiccuping heaves that made him red all over, and then Dean was crying too, scared,  _ scared, _ and Dad was driving faster, the rumble of the car drowning them both out.

Sammy has always had at least one finger knotted up with something connected to Dean, holds his hand, the hanging straps of backpacks, the trailing tails of his overshirts. He clings now with a tenacity - the hem of Dean’s t-shirt balled up in one fist and the toy car in the other. He shifts anxiously, rocking to himself and stares up at Dean with wet, fever bright eyes. Fine ringlet curls cling to his forehead humidly and every time he swallows there’s a thick clicking noise.

Sympathy itches all over and Dean hates the sound and the feel of it. 

He palms the hair off Sam’s forehead, slicks it straight up so that it’s standing on end like a little swoopy mohawk. He turns, points out Sammy’s reflection in the black mirror of the waxed finish of the Impala, smiles big and broad like it’ll make Sam laugh, maybe. 

Sam’s bottom lip trembles and Dean pats his bangs back down quickly, an apology. 

They haven’t been apart in forever. Since before the fire. 

“Be good for Caleb,” Dad says as he untangles the brothers without preamble, breaks Sam’s grip with his huge, broad hands. He plants Dean on the pavement outside and locks the door to the cab of the vehicle before Sam is able to wrap his chubby fist around the handle and come tumbling back out.

And then they’re gone.The dust that the Impala kicked up settles slowly to the earth.

A helpless stroke of hurt twinges in his chest as he stares after the fading tail lights. He didn’t even say goodbye. 

Caleb ushers him inside, asks him if he wants to see the new scopes his dad is going to be taking with them when he leaves.

Dean furrows his brow and gnaws on the inside of his own lip through the rest of the afternoon, fraught and shifting. The hours drag by on broken glass. He sits and watches the clock once Caleb exhausts everything that is interesting or kid-friendly in his entire home. He tries to set Dean up with some graham crackers and milk but Dean’s stomach is too twisted into knots to eat anything. The second hand trudges forward, around and around and around until Dean’s head is dizzy with it. 

It’s past sundown when the phone rings and Caleb lurches for it without dignity, asks, “John?” 

He does more listening than talking, hangs up somberly after a few long minutes, slumping under the weight of Dean’s eyes. 

“Hey, buddy,” he swallows thickly when he finally does turn back into the room. He keeps glancing all over, not meeting the very direct gaze of the eight year old in front of him. “Sam has an ear infection and they’re giving him medicine that is going to make that all better but, uh… he might not - he might not be home for a few more days.” 

Dean doesn’t understand. 

Caleb fills up the next week the best that he can with inane tasks and stilted conversations but if one afternoon was painful then eight days straight is a root canal. Dean doesn’t think that the tall grass on the back end of the property with all the grasshoppers and fireflies is that interesting, doesn’t care for the barn cats or the old, puffing dog that sleeps the afternoon away, he doesn’t want to play with puzzles or coloring books or building blocks. He wants to see Sam.

On the ninth day Dean hears the Impala before he sees it, an electric shock down his spine and lighting up his face. He’s far faster to react than the older man, ducks him deftly when he tries to intercept the frantic dash. Dean can barely hear Caleb call after him, his heartbeat is so loud in his ears. 

He is out the front door, halfway through careening down the steep steps when he sees the car, sees Dad through the windshield, and the Chevy comes to a halting stop.

Dean’s eyes flicker around the cab and the smile fades from his face the harder that he has to squint into the backseat, not seeing Sam’s gap tooth grin poking out from the backseat. 

He loses momentum on the stairs. 

He looks to the driver’s seat. 

Dad’s eyes are red and puffy, the way they haven’t been in years. Paler than Dean remembers, like he hasn’t sat in the sunlight the entire time he’s been away and his beard is longer, cheeks thinner. When the engine cuts out the expression on his face is something unfamiliar. 

He’s seen Dad cry before. After the fire. 

Just those handful of times before he started selling things - the house, the other car, the beds, the furniture - before he told Dean that they were going on a trip in the Impala and he needed to help pack a bag. 

Dean can hear the choking noises late in the night when something ugly starts to crawl out of Dad’s throat. He gives Dean his back when he tries to tug on his shirttails, crawls into a corner, into a bottle. 

The world that exists outside of the space between them narrows with each heartbeat that passes. Dean swallows hard, throat tightening. 

The engine idles, clicks and ticks and whirs itself down for a long moment before John stumbles the steps from the car. He doesn’t bother closing the door after himself. He returns with hollow eyes and empty hands and Dean can’t stand to touch him even as his father pulls him close. 

Hot, acidic hatred fills Dean up from bottom to top and it is more powerful than the anxiety and trepidation of the last few days, all of the smaller emotions he felt capable of before this moment are consumed by it. The world expands out at the edges to make more room for the red bleeding in.

John clings hard to keep him still, fists his hands into Dean’s shirt and smothers him close enough to crush even as Dean tries to crawl over his shoulder to get to the car. He cries, weeps a warm wet spot into Dean’s shoulder even as Dean starts to scream, “Where is Sammy?  _ Where is Sammy!” _

Dean kicks and punches and bites and he wants to  _ hurt  _ John, wants to see inside the car, wants to see  _ Sam.  _ He rocks his fists down into the back of his father’s hunched shoulders as hard as he can, screams as loud and as long as his lungs can bear but his father smothers him closer, clutches. Dean flails and he tries to escape the iron arms pinning him. He is enveloped from all corners, choking on mouthfuls of flannel shirt and leather jacket as he gasps for air. 

-

A nurse had “a couple of follow up questions.” 

John hadn’t had good enough follow up answers. 

-

Grief is a series of realizations. 

John donates Sam’s clothing, vacuums the last animal cracker crumbs out of the back seat, retires the plastic cups.

Dean lays on his back into the early hours of the morning while his father drives them - going anywhere, nowhere. He watches the shadows and streetlights play over the roof of the car and lets the tears stream past the raw corners of his eyes. 

They can go get Sam after, John says. After they find the thing that killed his mother. After they kill it and salt it and burn it into ashes;  _ after  _ they do those things they can go get him. This is the only way to keep Sammy safe, the only way to make the world safe for him.

-

Dean Winchester is twenty two years old and he has more maps than pictures of Sam. 

Henryetta is a city for people passing through. Sitting in the upper left quadrant of the crossroads of I40 and US62, more people drive through Henryetta in a month than actually live there. It’s just another town connected to all the others by thin grey threads, the only thing that defines it against other cities in Oklahoma being the ravenous creature dragging virgins into the dried out coal mines that the first structures of the town were built around. 

Not that the fact that the eight boys and three girls that have disappeared over the last sixteen months were virgins was advertised - but Dean puts it together after talking to a mother who crosses her chest and squeezes her hands together into steeple underneath her chin, leafing through a well worn diary’s pages, plucking a thin gold promise ring out a jewelry box. 

Something yowls to the black skies in the dead of the night in Henryetta. 

Usually there’s a fat stack of books or newspapers that gets piled in front of Dean’s face at the top of cases like these, but Henryetta has more churches than non-fiction books and hasn’t had a local newspaper since the twentieth century. The community history is all oral, passed between school children in play yards and from the mouths of parents in warning tones: “You best behave or that beast will come get you!” It takes some charm, some personality to pry it out of people - chatting up shop owners and school teachers to get a pulse on what the grit and history of living in Henryetta actually amounts to. 

The veins of the earth dried up, the people tell him. But that’s not why they closed off the lines. 

There are two maps of Henryetta; the beautiful one with the clean gridwork of streets with simple names like Main Street, 10th Street, Broadway and the ugly one; a fragile, ancient parchment with dyes and inks that have faded out tracking the mineral deposits sunk into the deep, dry dirt. The scale of the thing is all off, miles and meters mixed together and if Dean were a topographer he would be deeply offended. 

He has spent every night of the last two weeks with rocks in his shoes, squinting in low light with his father breathing down his neck, telling him that he’s holding the mine map wrong, has them heading in the wrong direction. Fourteen mines, John’s patience started running thin around Mine #8. 

Besides, things have been quiet in Henryetta since they started on the case. There was one kid, a fourteen year old boy named Stephen Freeman, that went missing when they first came into town a little over a month ago, but no inexplicable disappearances since. With the spree that this thing has been on over the last year and a half John’s sure it’s either dead already or in some sort of hibernation, waiting to start the ten year cycle all over again. John is sure, so sure of himself that he’s even willing to slack up some length on Dean’s leash. 

He’s been given tasks of his own before - the grind work. The gritty business of rinsing the gore off their boot bottoms. The grimy business of shoving through vents too small for the width of John’s shoulders. The gross business of wading into swamps with a shotgun lofted up high over his head, his father shouting directions from the banking.

He assumes this is more of that. An exercise in character-building, his father would say. Something to round him out as a man, as a soldier. 

The dusk is settling in on the landscape like a grey blanket - woolen and weighty. Fireflies sway through the final sun-warmth leaching up from the rocky earth and Dean hikes up the rest of the shale terrain from the mid point between Mine #10 and Mine #11, where John shakes his hand firmly and tells him to call in if he hears anything. 

The pack on his back has the works. They don’t know exactly what it is that they’re hunting so Dean had to haul out everything - the holy water, the rock salt, the iron, the silver, the matches, the accelerant, the guns, the knives, the ropes. It gouges a trench into one of his shoulders as the trail gets steeper, portions washed out and ill maintained since the industry in the regions shifted around the turn of the century. He works up a sweat and a grunt over the three quarter mile crawl down to the gaping maw of the cavern. 

A crooked line of railroad tracks fade down into the throat of the tunnels. He knows Mine #10 is the one they’ve been looking for from the smell wafting up from the bowels. 

Reeking rot and foulness, unmistakable decomposition. Dean has to step back into the treeline to catch his breath without choking on it. 

John said to call. 

And Dean even reaches around his shoulder to the pouch where he packed up the satellite phone before slowing to a still. 

He’s twenty two now, isn’t he? Older than John himself was when he shipped off with the Marines. Old enough to drink in real bars now, even though he’s been finding ways to get around that for years yet. Old enough to start making some decisions for himself. John certainly wouldn’t be calling  _ him  _ right now if their positions were reversed. 

_ “Yew!”  _

Dean twists on the spot, heel of his boot gouging a circle in the loose leaves and gravel. The sound echoes out from the black guts of the earth and then off of the side of the hill for a short moment and then he’s alone in the dying sunlight again.

He’s not even a virgin. What’s the worst that could happen?

Dean’s eyes adjust slowly in the dark. The blackness below the crust level of the cavern has a physical presence on his skin and he keeps himself low and close to the wall, feet light and even when he paces deeper into the maze of the mine. No map, no torch, Dean wants to afford himself as much of the element of surprise as possible. He pauses at intersections and then he feels out structured openings in the rough walls. Listens. 

_ “Yew!” _

The sound is a shade of what the bookshop owner had described in an interview he thought he was having with a true crime novelist Dean fabricated to get the conversation motivated in morbid directions. He’d huffed and flustered, busied himself with straightening shelves and spoke over his shoulder like he’d be able to deny saying anything at all afterwards. 

“Sound that thing makes - you’ve never heard anything like it before in your life. You’ll know it from anything when you do. Some places in this world press up closer to Hell than others. Close enough for things to cross through. It lives down there now, in the mines. Where it was born. It only comes out when it's hungry and it eats screams. That’s that sound it makes. All those screams.” 

_ “Yew!”  _

Close enough to hurt his ears, Dean has to hold his breath against the stench. Underneath the coughing, rasping bark there’s another noise. Scraping, shifting and clattering rocks across the ground and a heavy, meaty  _ thunk  _

_ thunk  _

_ thunk.  _

A basic, heaving rhythm and when Dean presses his back into the rocks he can feel the reverberation through his hollow chest.

It’s throwing something against the cavern walls. Again. And again. 

It’s in his human condition to feel afraid. The adrenaline spikes up through the base of his skull like an ice pick, makes everything move slower and make more sense. In his left hand is the Stinger flashlight. In his right hand is the Desert Eagle Mark VII. 

He can feel his pulse as an erratic drumbeat in the thin skin of his neck when he rocks his head against the wall. Cakey dust and filmy cobwebs knock loose down the back of his collar. He listens in to one, two, three more of those heavy _thunk_ s with his eyes twisted shut tight and he draws a map in his mind of what the corridor on the other side of this corner might look like. Fifteen feet, maybe, from the head of the cavern. Battering up against the left side of the walls. 

Dean breathes in. I’m brave, he thinks. 

He pivots out into the opening of the corridor, flashlight and firearm lined up. When he flips the switch the light startles the underground, scorches his retinas and surprises the creature. 

_ “Yew!” _

There is no name for what the beast is. Some of the Henryetta locals Dean talked to called it The Howler or The Yowler or The Prowler. The name of it doesn’t matter nearly as much as the meat. 

The front half of the animal's face is rotting away. It stumbles, throwing its massive head from side to side like it can thrash the light away from its one good eye. Loose muscle and sloughing flesh peel back from its face and scrape down to the yellow bone in patches next to the ridge over its teeth where an upper lip should be, cresting over a cheekbone and a dry socket. The fur of it was white at some point, grey and green and black and red now with clumps of dirt and twigs knotted in. 

The screech that tears out of the animal echoes out of the cavern, through the tunnels and off off the side of the black hills somewhere far away. It kicks with its scrabbling feet for a weak, stumbling moment that Dean can only observe in stiff horror. 

It’s dying. Couldn’t be more clear if it was written in the pattern of its matted hair or frothing mouth. 

The one wild eye rolls around the hall, pupil blown. Unseeing and, after a few disoriented moments, unknowing. The bulk of the animal shutters upright and Dean locks in his stance, presses in on the trigger before the beast butts its head back up against the wall with a heavy, hollow  _ thunk.  _

It resumes beating Itself against the wall, pawing and gnawing and the bits of hanging sinew while badgering its huge head against the rocks to knock more meat loose. Scraping up against the coarseness of the shaft the way a feline would, It drags the corner of Its mouth like Its laying scent. Dean can hear fangs grinding.

“Yew!”  It coughs to nothing, for no one, loose folds of fur warbling under its neck. It chews with serrated hind teeth. “Yew!” 

Isolated in the darkness, a pathetic and gruesome creature. It has lived alone and It is dying alone. 

Pulling the trigger feels almost like a mercy. 

“You!” 

He wonders what Sam’s doing right now. 

-

It’s an easy thing tracking Sam’s movements on a map, too. Once Dean got the hang of doing it on the big huge road maps, the smaller detailed local ones that you can pick up in a gas station for a couple of cents are no big deal. 

Rochester is a beautiful city if you’re looking in from the water or out to the water. If you’re just looking at it as a series of gridded lines and shadowed footprints for buildings it’s not as cute. 

John, for whatever it could be worth, keeps a tight track on Sam through the system. He always has names and dates and addresses, Sam’s grades too and - holy shit is that kid smart. 

Dean snatches them out of his father’s hands whenever he catches sight of them. He assumes that John pulls them from one of the dozens of PO boxes tucked into intentionally unremarkable towns that his father organizes, but he doesn’t spend too much time thinking about it when he rushes to read the teacher’s notes.

Sam is described as mature, soft spoken, insightful. Dean wonders what that actually means when you put it all together and shake it up. He’s clearly not a disruptive kid. He never gets detention or reprimands or demerits the way that Dean did whenever they rooted down in any town long enough to enroll. 

It seemed ridiculous to him that he has to focus on killing the thing that killed his mother, saving every schmuck that they stumbled across along the way, and getting a regular high school education at the same time, but his father had insisted. To keep him busy, Dean assumes. 

Dean hadn’t hated school or anything, though. Slept through some of it, sure. Maybe picked a fight or two just to show he could. But he enjoyed the time outside of the car, liked meeting new people, even learned a thing or two.

Clearly not as much as Sam did. The kid could go to college anywhere he wants to, and - there’s a thought. Because Dean Winchester is twenty two years old and that means that as of May 2nd Sam was officially no longer the responsibility of the state of New York. 

Dean’s been pulling the postage from the envelopes that the report cards come in, crossing a big black ‘X’ over every new address that they’ve shipped Sam off to. He’s been shuffled from one corner of the city to the other, between wide suburbs and cramped metrocenters every few months and Dean wonders if Sam feels the same way that he does, sometimes. New scenery, new people. Close enough to touch for the amount of time that it would take to reach for them and then gone all over again. 

Dean stopped having the energy to lift his hand years ago. 

A huge nation full of faces and stories and so many of them are so sad it could steal the breath right out of his mouth if he let it. Dean means nothing to any of them. A passing face in the crowd. A stranger that knows something they don’t.

Dean knows that he doesn’t get to keep the kisses that he charms out of the girls in the towns that he blows through, the laughs that his cracked jokes earn him in dive bars along the way, or the meals in the diners he sits in just for an excuse to stretch his legs out of the car. He’s just borrowing them. 

He wonders what Sam borrows. 

The recognizable growl of the Impala’s engine rattles Dean out of the thought and he folds his maps and his report cards and his pens all back into the pages of the atlas, tries to make himself look busy preparing their packs to head out of Henryetta, Oklahoma (1,250 miles to Rochester, New York; not that it matters now.)

His ears are still ringing from the reverberating gunshot in the cavernous mines but he can tell that his father is in a bad mood from the sound of his boots gouging into the gravel outside of the motel room’s door, can tell he’s drunk from the number of times it takes him to slot the key into the lock and stagger through. 

Dean’s tired before the handle even turns. 

John Winchester walks in, all boozy presence and dark demeanor, like he brings a cloud of continual smoke with him wherever he goes. Probably mad Dean didn’t call to be micromanaged in killing a dying animal now that he’s had time to think and drink about it.

He weaves on his feet with the momentum of swinging open the door before shoving it closed roughly behind him. There’s something clenched in his fist that Dean can’t get a good look at before it's being slapped down on the comforter in front of his duffle. 

“The fuck is this, Dean?” John demands, voice resonating. 

Dean’s mouth goes dry. 

It’s fairly obvious what ‘this’ is - a photo of Sammy in a bright red graduation robe, a flat billed cap with a tassel hanging off over the side. His hair is longer than Dean’s ever seen it before, curling along the back of his neck and behind his ears. He’s grown up - and Dean means  _ up -  _ because the kid is a half a head taller than anyone else in the photo. He’s a skinny kid with long fingers and wide palms that remind Dean of when puppies have big, bumbling paws that are indicative of how big and broad the whole animal will eventually be. 

Sam is smiling in the photos, but it looks forced and insincere like he’s really grinding his teeth together to keep his face in that position. The strained look makes it easier for the eyes of an observer to slide over his morose expression to the background of assorted third party faces, to where Dean’s beaming smile is clearly peering out from the crowd. 

Dean snatches for the photo, not fast enough before John yanks it away. “Where did you get that?” 

“Not relevant!” John barks and his words smell like whisky, hot in Dean’s face and swamping the room. “Not my question! What  _ the fuck  _ is this?”

It had just been such a nice day - they’d been laid out in Rhode Island and John had drunk himself into a stupor and it had only been a three hour drive - how was Dean supposed to resist a three hour drive? Sam was only going to graduate high school  _ this one time.  _

He doesn’t say any of that. 

What he says is, “I do everything that you ask me to do.” 

John blinks at him. 

Dean burns the bodies, he salts the land, he sews the stitches. He has the fucking maps to prove that he has done every single thing that John Winchester has ever asked him to do - he has loaded the guns and sharpened the knives and practiced his breathing, practiced  _ his patience  _ for fourteen years _. _

“I just wanted to see him.” 

John sucks down a groan, lower teeth bared out as a foulness passes over his expression. He growls and twists away from his son, kicking at the minifridge in a short, sharp movement that leaves a dent and makes Dean jump. 

“We have talked about this over and  _ over,  _ Dean!” His voice carries when he shouts. “The only way to keep Sam safe - the only way to make any of this worth it is to make sure that Sam stays out of it! All the way out!” 

“I never agreed to that!” Dean’s blood pressure rises to the occasion and this was not how he saw the rest of this evening going but he’d be lying if he said he’d never wanted to say it before. 

“You have never been practical about this. You’ve  _ seen _ what is out there, Dean! You know what we’re protecting him from! Sam is safer where he is. Just because you  _ want _ something doesn’t mean that you get to  _ have _ it!” 

Dean barks out a laugh, sardonic and cold in his own ears. The boldness boils his blood. “Do you even hear yourself? We have been hunting the thing that killed mom for almost eighteen years and we still don’t even know  _ how _ we would kill it  _ if  _ we found it!” he shouts. “We’ve wasted years-”

“Wasted?” John locks in, cuts him off with the tone of his voice. The presence of him is another wall in the room. “You think the kid we pulled out of that ditch with the nightcrawlers in Nevada thinks we wasted our time? Do you think the woman we saved from that haunted house in South Dakota thinks that you haven’t been doing something important?”

“None of those people are Sam!” 

None of those people are  _ his brother.  _

John scoffs up a noise from the back of his throat and it comes out grimy and dark. “Sam doesn’t even know who you are, Dean. What do you think is gonna happen if you introduce yourself to him? Take him on the road with you? Settle down? Hm? How exactly do you see that conversation going? He doesn’t even remember that you  _ exist.” _

The electronic clock on the bedside table flips soundlessly from 11:59pm to 12:00am. 

“Dean, I didn’t - ” 

“Fuck you.” His jaw aches to say it. 

John blinks blearily, maybe thinking that he must be dreaming or hallucinating because his son may raise his voice upon occasion and even resorts to a bit of backtalk now and then but there’s no way that his _Dean,_ his patient little soldier, would ever -

“Fuck you!” Dean says again: louder, sharper off his tongue. The ringing in his ears gets more acute, drowning out everything else. He does the math, cracks it out in his head behind a spasming muscle in his eye, because if there are fifty two weeks in a year and it’s been almost fifteen years since the last time Sam said his name out loud, then there have been seven hundred eighty weeks, all with seven days and twenty four hours in them - hours that Sam has been missing. “ _ You  _ lost him. Not me.”

Dean watches his mouth, keeps their secrets, researches the ghosts and demons and monsters until his heart is heavy and eyes are sore. He does  _ everything _ that his father asks. Dean has never asked for anything, except for this one thing.

He takes his maps and his bags and the keys to the car with him when he leaves.

-

Finding Sam at college isn’t half as hard as Dean thinks it’s going to be. With Sam’s GPA he starts at the top of the list and works his way down, gets all the way to Stanford before he chats Betsy in the admissions office through confirming that Sam Wesson has joined them on campus for the spring semester. 

Dean laughs freely when he hangs up the phone, tosses it over his shoulder into the backseat next to the journal that got left behind in the transition. He should have figured that Sam would make for a warmer climate as soon as he was cut loose from upstate New York.

He plugs in  _ Bat Out of Hell,  _ twists the volume as loud as it’ll go because it’s operatic and obnoxious and his father hates Meat Loaf. With his head out the window the dry Southwest air rips through his hair, longer now than he’s ever been allowed to keep it before. Dean screams along at the full capacity of his lungs -  _ I’m gonna hit the highway like a battering ram -  _ and does just that. 

From Henryetta it’s I40 West toward Amarillo, cut south on TX27, intent to drive straight through the big, flat, beautiful night to Odessa before he catches a short few hours of sleep in the backseat of the car, pulled off on a dead sideroad in Texas.

Sure, there are more direct ways to get to Palo Alto from Oklahoma, probably could have saved himself a full day of driving if he had just stayed on I40 through to California, but the horizon is a finish line far off in the hazy, orange distance all the way through the deserts and he’s the only car on the road for miles and miles into Arizona.

Dean leans into the gas pedal with all of his weight and howls at the huge moon overstaying its welcome in the purple morning sky.

He treats himself to some authentic “authentic-Mexican” food in Tucson, pulling off the endless grey blur of pavement to gas up and satisfy his hunger pains. He passes over a few crumpled dollar bills in exchange for the hefty burrito and there’s a moment, a short instance where the kid behind the register glances up to pass over Dean’s change.

The kid swallows hard while reaching over the counter between them, like something in Dean’s pocket is going to lash out and snap at him.

He’s a few minutes back on the road before he knuckles off the music and gives himself a glance over in the rearview mirror, angling it off the road behind him. The silence in the empty car all around him sets his ears ringing again. 

Eyebrows, nose, chin and cheeks all where he left them and all where they need to be - a small dent of a scar high on his right cheekbone, spring-sun freckles on the bridge of his nose. He’s a few days past due for a shave and it itches something awful now that he’s thinking about it. 

Dean scrubs into his jaw and angles the mirror down to the drooping ring of his collar, the rusty brown blood stain. 

“Shit,” Dean hisses under his breath and licks his thumb, like scrubbing at it is going to help at all at this point. “Shit, shit, shit.”

This is his best shirt. 

-

Clarissa Thomhop hadn’t actually wanted to get a retail job after school -  _ god, as if _ \- her mother had insisted as a character growing exercise and her father as an excuse to wean her off her childhood allowances. Like, it was either the afternoon shift at  _ Missy’s Thrift and Emporium  _ or math tutoring. 

She retches even to think about it. 

So, whatever - she takes the bus after school to downtown Yuma and walks the three blocks to where “DONATIONS GO AROUND BACK” is painted on grimy windows larger and bolder than the actual sign for the store. 

She picks musty clothes out of soggy cardboard boxes with a pink bandana tied around her face, squealing whenever moths or spiders come tumbling out after. She hauls bulky VCR sets and those ugly desktop computers with the dumb apples painted on them that weigh, like, eighty pounds. She even spends six straight hours alphabetizing the bookshelves by title before her manager, Lisa, tells her that she had meant for the books to be alphabetized by author. One time she reached into a coat pocket after hearing something rattling around and found a molar. 

Clarissa  _ sweats _ and she  _ complains _ and she  _ makes very little money _ but she would rather find a thousand human teeth in a coat literally made out of spiders than have to deal with one customer in person. 

She had only even “agreed” to “assist” with this one customer this one time because he was cute - in, like, a gritty James Van Der Beek kind of way. 

He’s wearing some classic levis and a leather jacket that’s a little too long in the sleeves when he walks in, a fresh haircut and a patchy shave. He has an easy smile and quick, “Afternoon, ladies,” for she and Lisa. 

As soon as he turns his back Lisa locks eye contact with Clarissa and mouths, “Make sure he doesn’t steal anything.” 

Clarissa drops the sticker gun she was using to label CD cases to the counter with an eye roll. 

She finds him again sorting through the men’s section, the part of the racks where the graphic t-shirts and the merch from bands that peaked in the 70s accumulate. Clearly she’s not being stealthy enough standing behind the shoe racks because he catches her gaze head-on with a bright smile, something jubilant and manic behind the expression. “Hey! Can I get your opinion on something?” 

Clarissa wants to say no but instead she grimaces out a smile and bridges the gap. “What do you want?” she asks, even though Lisa told her to start saying ‘How can I help you?’ 

He stands back, observing the wall like the two racks of t-shirts in the back of  _ Missy’s  _ are a whole department in  _ Bloomingdales. _ “I’m trying to find something respectable.”

“Respectable?” she repeats.

“Yeah, y’know,” he rolls a hand in the air, feigning casualty while fringing on frantic, “Like, not intimidating.”

Clarissa doesn’t think the two are inherently related. “Who are you trying to not-intimidate?”

He eyes her sideways, cuts into sizing her up where she stands in her shredded leggings and denim skirt, the frizz-crimped hair tied up in a scrunchy, her dead-eyed stare. “Can you keep a secret?”

“No.” 

“I’m about to see my brother for the first time in fourteen years.”

“Oh. Cool.” Clarissa takes half a second to pray to God that he doesn’t launch into an explanation before it’s too late and she’s knee deep in this guy’s life.

He hemorrhages the story in a flash flood of words, gushing with the intensity and lack of restraint of someone who wants something very, very desperately and has absolutely no one to share it with. The story drags out for several long minutes, all about being separated in foster care and how the brother just aged out of the system and Dean - he shoves in an introduction between details - is on forty hours of driving, five hours of sleep, and hoping to meet his brother before dinner tomorrow.

Clarissa kneads at her temple when he finally stops to catch his breath, processing. “That’s… a lot, dude.” 

“Yeah.” Dean sighs, nodding. “So now it’s 600 miles to Palo Alto, I’ll stake out the student center or the library, and then,” he whistles and zips his hand off in the air like “ _ that’s all she wrote.” _

Clarissa waits another beat and a half because, that can’t be it, can it? 

He chats her through fourteen years and 3,000 miles, mania ringing around behind his exhausted eyes like a tolling bell, and the imaginings stop the second he actually sees this smart kid he’s gabbing on about?

He seems younger and younger the longer Clarissa looks at him. She’d mistaken him for a real adult when he walked in earlier but from this close she can see that he’s only a few years older than her. For whatever confidence bracing his shoulders and lacing up his grin he doesn’t have all the answers, doesn’t even seem to know what questions he should be asking. 

This guy is trying to ride off into a Hollywood sunset with an absolute stranger, completely oblivious to the fact that it's just a Tuesday. 

“I’m gonna be honest,” she says. “I don’t think that any of these shirts are gonna work for what you’re going for.”

-

Dean finds Sam on Wednesday morning and it’s not even when he’s looking. 

The breakfast joint catches his eye from the road a few minutes after he rolls past the city limits. The name of the place is  _ American Diner  _ and Dean likes that - straight to the point, tells him what to expect. 

Except for how it didn’t at all. 

He’s pocketing the car keys, kicking his heels out to get the circulation pumping back to the spots where it should be and looking forward to a cup of black coffee to keep him powered through the rest of the day when he comes up short on the sidewalk. 

Dean doesn’t play scratchers and he’s never bought a lottery ticket, but he can imagine. Has to feel something like this - not just the winning a million dollars, but the jarring surprise too. Everything is one way in one moment and then radically different in the next.

Sam is sitting with his wide shoulders facing out to the street in the window. Dean recognizes the back of his head, has seen enough of it over the years to feel nostalgic for the whorling pattern of his cowlick, grown out long.

A pane of glass and ten feet in between them, this is the closest that they’ve been since the morning Dean tried to get Sam to smile and Sam twisted his little fist into Dean’s shirt. 

His whole body is numb from the rock and weave of the road, sore and creaky from being crammed up too tight for too long. Past that twilight phase of exhaustion and back around again. He passes the space between the car and the threshold in a trance, can't even feel his pulse pick up pace. 

Dean looks like shit, knows he does even in the new t-shirt that he smoothes over his stomach compulsively. He’s barely slept in two days, been getting tunnel vision looking out past the line of the road in front of him and now he’s here. All of that buzzing energy he’d clenched tightly in his fist two days ago left him singed in the corners, burnt out. He forgot his razor on the bathroom counter of a Super 8 in Oklahoma and had to make due with what he could scrounge together from gas stations in Mesa. He smells like unwashed man and desert salt. 

Sam Winchester is taller, broader, and more alive than Dean could have ever dared to hope. He is beautiful the way that a sunrise on a mountainside in Colorado during the spring is beautiful; the creaking ice and the thawing blooms while fumbly, bumbly little pollinators start their busy work. Fresh face, clear eyes, young and strong and clean. 

His forearms span the entire width of the small, square cafe table at the far corner of the bench seating, long fingers hanging loosely off one side while he picks at the corner of a paper menu with his other hand. There’s an empty chair at the other side of the table. 

Two meters to the empty chair at the other side of Sam’s table. Nothing stopping Dean from crossing it. So much squandered time - every day before today was a funeral. 

Sam glances up from his menu in a natural, thoughtless movement and Dean just happens to be at the other side of the room for the first time in fourteen years.

Dean wants to believe that Sam’s gaze is drawn to his, polarized to the opposite end of the magnet that Dean has been gravitating back to for his entire life. Sam must feel it, has to, it’s too huge and humbling not to. They picked the same diner on the same morning. It has to mean something.

There is no light. There is no flash of recognition. 

Dean hadn’t thought that his father was lying. He knew that Sam was just a baby when they took him, tore him away from Dean by the seams. Gone. John told him the truth as he understood it from the vantage above, peering over his sons’ head and policing the edges of their conversations with strangers. He didn’t know. The fire smelted them together. There is a phantom limb where someone used to live. 

Sam’s eyes are closer to grey than green. Dean can’t believe he forgot. 

And then they are gone. 

Skipping over and behind Dean, ripping the top layer of his skin off as they go, Sam fixes in on the beautiful blonde that has bubbled in through the front door. 

It’s the first rays of sun cracking the purple sky when Sam’s face lights up with a smile. He breathes in deeply, Dean imagines he can hear the dreamy sigh that escapes on the cluttered air. There’s a mist and a light in the back of his gaze and when the girl brushes past Dean in a swirl of blonde curls and loose skirts she steps right into Sam’s arms.

Sam’s on a date. 

Dean has terrible timing and Sam is on a date. 

They blush and kick their feet about for a few seconds before taking their seats, Sam pulling out her chair with trembling hands and Dean realizes starkly, in a cold wash, that this is their  _ first  _ date. He was about to sit himself down in the middle of Sam’s first date with this normal, beautiful girl on this normal, beautiful morning and derail everything in three sentences or less. 

“Sir?” The hostess has caught his lost expression in the low bustle of a regular morning shift. She touches his elbow gently, kindly, and Dean startles. “Do you need any help?”

“No, sorry.” He clears his throat, takes a step back towards the door and there’s now four meters between him and Sam, five, six. “I thought that I was meeting someone here.” 

-

Palo Alto is mostly gridwork neighborhoods and shops around the college. Between San Francisco and San Jose, the college and the city have never wanted for infrastructure so there are dozens of highways that Dean could take back here any time that he wants. 

Looking at it from above everything looks so tidy, streets and side alleys connecting and routing through blocks of housing and into shopping centers. 

He wonders if this is how John feels about everything all the time. From such an impersonal distance it’s easy to see what roads lead where. 

The first mark on the map is over the restaurant where Sam saw him for the first time. He marks down a few more. The dorm where Sam sleeps on pale blue sheets and keeps a short stack of cassette tapes in the top drawer of his bedside table. The library where Sam rents a study cubby and he signs his name on the schedule with ‘Sam W.’ 

He’s happy for Sam. Great school, great girl, great life. Sam has done fine without Dean. Got himself a full ride to Stanford, didn’t he? 

Dean is the one that drove forty hours to get here. 

And he can drive back anytime that he wants. It’s fine. He was just having a moment. Riding high on telling his father to fuck off. 

What did he even think was going to happen anyway? 

This isn’t about him. 

It’s about Sam. The real one that lives in California and takes a full course load at Stanford and applied to be a tutor. The pretend one that lives in Dean’s chest and misses him back.

He starts up a new calculation in the margins of the atlas. The first hunt he takes on his own is in Paisley, Oregon. 512 miles from Palo Alto. 


	2. Rochester, NY

Sam wakes up on the edge of a razor, jackknifes upright in bed to the ugly tune of his own wet gasping. The darkness is thick in the bedroom, windows facing away from the first touches morning light that must be bleeding onto the horizon. 

The nightmare is melting before Sam can pin it, chasing down those last fleeting images like smoke on the air. He searches the cracks and corners of the room like the answer might be trapped in there with him. 

It used to happen all the time when he was a little kid, triggered by an old rock song crackling out over the speakers in a gas station or the smoky smell of fireplaces at work from the street in the early autumn.

“Deja vu,” he’d say with a thin smile if anyone ever noticed his goosebumps, even though it wasn’t strictly true. He’ll have deja vu sometimes too, the normal stuff that creeps up and convinces you that you’ve been in this room, with these people, laughing at this joke before; that you inevitably will again. 

This feeling, though. It’s a reaction. An emotion, rather than an experience. It rips open a deep and anxious pit in Sam’s chest - hollows him out in a cold instant every time. He feels it in his roiling gut and jittery fingers.

He’d weep about it as a child, try to explain in pitiful gestures and weak words that he feels the physical mutilation of it inside his ribcage, like he should be  _ somewhere else -  _ not anywhere else but  _ somewhere  _ there is someone waiting for him. 

“A lot of children in foster care feel that way, Sam,” his case worker told him with a smile that was actually a frown. 

The feeling stopped being able to touch him during the day the older that he got, had to carve out a tunnel from the back of his consciousness into the nebulous void behind in order to survive and now it only comes crawling back out while he’s asleep. 

He leans over the stack of textbooks that doubles as a nightstand to check his digital watch, squinting against the sickly electronic green. His t-shirt sticks to his lower back. Twelve minutes before his six a.m. alarm officially blares. 

Sam allows himself one small, dismal groan and fills the time by rolling over and crushing his nose into Jessica’s mess of hair. He breathes in the smell of her perfumed shampoo deep enough to fill all raw crevices in his chest and savors indulgently, but it doesn’t touch the headache that beats to life behind his eyes.

She hums a contented little note in her sleep, settles deeper into Sam’s chest but he can’t stay. He peppers a few more kisses across her cheeks, down her shoulder as he extracts himself from between the sheets.

Jess had wanted to celebrate when he got his bachelor’s in the spring and then again when he received a 174 on the LSAT but he had put his foot down hard. Every spare second of his time has been crammed with tutoring sessions. He tells her that it’s because he’s saving up for a car, tells himself that it’s because he’s saving up for a ring to propose with, but really he’s just to keep his tumbling mind distracted and his trembling hands busy. Even on a Sunday. 

Sam never thought these small panic attacks were particularly interesting or notable, especially when they started to fade away altogether when he was eighteen - when he finally got to California. There have been three blissfully quiet years but now it feels like everything is worse than ever. He can barely sleep through the night anymore. His mind starts to wander down apprehensive paths through the days, he catches himself having accidentally walked blocks farther than he intended to or that he’s been mindlessly typing a single letter over and over again before he comes back to reality. 

He’s sure that it has everything to do with change and stress and transitions. He’s spent his entire life building from the absolute ground up, brick by heavy brick, had to dig it all up and start all over again time after time. Sam isn’t sure he’ll know what to do with stability once he gets it, but that hungry ache for something that looks and feels normal sits in his empty stomach every day. 

The seasons in Palo Alto tend to smudge together, especially compared to Rochester, but there is a breezy, chilled rain sprinkling down today. A woman in a light knee length rain jacket pushes a stroller down the other side of the street, gives him a polite smile when he steps out onto the sidewalk from his apartment. A man in denim and a hi-vis vest is marking out lines on the sidewalk down the road. A car turns the corner, some beefy black classic kept in pristine condition with an engine that quakes the earth as it rolls by. Sam tracks its crawl down the street as he jangles his keys in his palm. Raindrops bead across the wide hood, glittering in the overcast morning light. He feels more than sees eyes on his skin until the vehicle turns again at the other end of the block.

Sam frowns, turns away. 

-

Other children are born quite traditionally, when they are infants to a mother with a father and a family that presumably expected and wanted them. They come into this world wet and warm and screaming, complete dependents on the hands that hold them. 

Sam came into this world fully formed, without a mother or father, silent and combative.

He doesn’t know when or why he stopped talking exactly, just that his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth whenever any of these new faces asks him things that no one has ever asked him before. A short woman with a dark curtain of hair and a pleasant smile sits next to Sam in a room built just for small children to answer questions in, a fresh pack of the good crayons and construction paper nudging closer and closer to his side of the table as she asks him where his mommy is. 

He bites her arm when she presses the paper close enough. 

Whoever Sam Wesson was before he turned up at Strong Memorial Hospital slips through the cracks, three short years of history fading into the ether with each silent morning Sam spends sleeping in a bed that isn’t his. 

The first thing that he really remembers is being so small and having skinned shins, raw palms on a sidewalk. He can still taste the bitter coppery flavor of his own blood from where he bit his tongue, can still see Jeremy Schuemaker standing towering over him if he screws his eyes shut tight enough - the toy car clenched in his fist. 

As far as Sam knows, the first noise he ever makes in his entire life is the scream that rips through his chest when he launches for the older boy’s throat. Later that day he sat in his caseworker’s office, staring at a neutrally yellow wall as he seethed and sniffed around a bloody nose. Sam’s the one with the toy car now. 

Sam has lived with seven families in the last ten years, not counting the first family that he doesn’t remember when he was first pulled into the system, or the second that he was with for only a few weeks. 

The first house had been overcrowded, Sam was one in six faces that needed to be fed three times a day, carted to and from schools and offices and appointments. He doesn’t remember their faces very well, never felt confident enough to meet their eyes in the time that he was there, but he can remember the wrathful words that they rained down upon him whenever they did realize that he even existed at all.

Sam just tries to keep his head down, his mouth shut. They tell him the whole time to not expect to be there for very long, so he never bothers to get comfortable. He folds his clothing the way that he’s told, scrubs until the pads of his hands are rubbed raw and sensitive from the chemicals, and hides as much food and as many found coins and crumpled dollar bills that he can get a hold of.

The first time Sam runs away from a foster home it’s with thirteen dollars he’d stolen from coat pockets lining the inside of his sock and a backpack full of canned soup without a can opener. He makes it sixteen blocks on foot, powered by sheer determination and blind precociousness, but he hasn’t thought about it much beyond wanting to be anywhere else,  _ somewhere  _ else. 

He gets picked up before the sun starts to dip in the sky, plucked up off the street by a portly police officer who puffs, “Whoa there, buddy!” when he snags the hood of Sam’s sweatshirt.

Sam is passed from hand to hand, house to house. It’s not the last time he tries to run away. Attempts two and three barely get him out of the neighborhood, though attempt four Sam even makes it as far as Buffalo on a packed Greyhound before the bus driver locks eyes with him in the rearview mirror and steps aside to make a phone call. 

Each time Sam is sent back to Rochester - he does not pass go, he does not collect two hundred dollars - and each time he’s found on the side of a street or crouching behind the seats on a train the eyes on him get less and less sympathetic. 

Mostly Sam is uncomfortable. He doesn’t like being seen by expectant eyes, being chided and goaded to speak or listen or to just stop staring out windows. They ask him questions about himself, what he’s thinking, how he’s feeling, like they’re actually going to do anything with the information. He sits in barren bedrooms or crowded classrooms and feels himself become part of the furniture. He reads when he can - goes to the faraway places he can’t touch where all suffering comes to resolution. When he can’t read he palms up spare change off of bus station counters and keeps it in his pillowcase.

When he isn’t bored he’s in pain. 

There is a woman who crosses a ruler to his palm and forces him to speak real words, pries the vowels and consonants from between his clenched teeth with pliers. A ‘sister’ who pinches and punches at his arms and sides whenever a ‘father’ turns his back. His hair gets tugged and twisted, chunks of it sawed off his head with bright yellow safety scissors as a ring of children bigger than him laugh and ask the same questions the adults do - “Where’s your mommy, Sammy?” 

When he is deposited into the custody of the Petrov household Sam Wesson is thirteen years old and has low expectations as soon as they turn into the neighborhood. The apartment buildings are historical artifacts, bricks sooty dark from the industrial revolution with thin, twisting fire escapes scaling between looming windows. 

He clambors out of the backseat of his caseworker’s car on gangly limbs. The garbage bag that holds the books and shoes and dirty clothes that account for all of his material possessions drags after him. 

The woman waiting at the top of the stoop looks like she was cut out of a magazine; one of those old hollywood glamour zines with the soft, noir lighting. She is a figure in crimson on a bright blue day. She smiles a pleasant, scarlet smile when she sees them, tosses a mane of shiny carmine hair over her shoulder and descends the stone steps like she’s floating. 

Sam twists his incredulous expression back towards the driver’s seat. 

This has gotta be a joke, right? Why the hell would Grace Kelly’s redheaded sister take in a foster kid? Least of all one Sam’s age, with Sam’s history of light fingers and flighty feet. 

His caseworker just smiles vapidly, waves him forward with encouraging hands. 

Introductions are brief. She speaks in short, confident sentences - plows right through the hard ‘H’s and rolling ‘R’s of her Eastern European accent and the occasional sentence fragment. 

Sam tracks the woman's movements: the graceful mechanics of her firm handshake, the hinge where her jaw connects with her neck when she nods along to whatever Sam’s caseworker is even talking about. 

His eyes flicker between the two of them suspiciously. He waits for the punchline, the ‘gotcha!’

It doesn’t come. 

When Sam’s caseworker clears out it is really, honestly, for real just the two of them. 

Sam Wesson and Ms. Petrov. 

Sam likes to think that in all of his years of meeting new people his ability to glean together a first impression is pretty acute. She seems to be a well put together lady to his eye, someone that thinks things through before committing, and then committing fully when they do. He doesn’t know why she’s volunteered to pretend to be someone else’s mother, but he feels from the control that she holds herself with that she is determined to be accomplished at it. 

She’s been avoiding looking at him straight in the face the whole time and he imagines that he is also not what she had been expecting. She breathes in, finally stares right back at him, takes in his greasy hair and ripped up denim and makes her own conclusions. 

“Stand up straight,” is the first thing she says directly to him. 

Sam, startled by the flat firmness of the command, does so. He pulls himself to his full height, rolls his shoulders back and feels the muscles across his chest stretch as his spine cracks into alignment. He is scrutinized for another long moment, longer than anyone has looked directly at him in a long time, long enough that he’s grinding the toe of his shoe into the ground and trying to find anything else to bring up. 

“What kind of boy are you?” she finally asks, suspicious. ‘Boy’ comes out like it has two vowels crammed tightly together in the center and Sam finds himself having to think about the question longer than he intended. 

No one has ever asked him that before. 

What kind of boy is he? A resourceful one, he thinks. A brazen, bold boy that doesn’t like questions like this. A boy that doesn’t want to be here, on this stoop, in this city.

“An incorrigible one,” he says, snotty in his tone. 

Her eyes narrow to slits. “What is word?” she says, ‘v’s for ‘w’s.

Sam flushes, not thinking that he was going to have to explain himself more than the shot. She stays looking at him directly, grey eyes in full force and expectant that he clarify. “It’s…” he stumbles. “Incorrigible means that you’re not going to change, like, who you are. As a person. That you’re not sorry.”

“Ah!” Her face relaxes and she smiles again. “You are smart boy! Very good. Come, come.” 

If it was a test Sam thinks that he passed. 

-

The headache gets worse over the course of the day and Sam feels irritable, unable to focus exactly on the rotation of faces that are actually paying him to explain the subject in front of him. He tips a few aspirin into his mouth with the last dregs of his coffee but after three hours and no changes he’s ready to admit that they didn’t do anything to help.

Halfway through a tedious edit of a freshman’s philosophy paper his cell phone starts buzzing in his pocket, cutting into the silence and Sam’s tenuous focus. He mumbles an apology, squints against the harsh fluorescent lights in the library to read the screen - Incoming: Beck. 

Sam lets it go to voicemail. 

He listens through the message instead of eating lunch, worried that it’s something important but Beck just gushes, flooding with good luck wishes for his law school interview tomorrow, tells him that she’s got her fingers crossed and wants a call right away afterwards to know if she needs to come over with wine for Jess and him. Sam grimaces his way off the line, kneading at his temple and tapping his foot.

He feels old today. Like the mechanics of his life are some tedious burden on his patience. There’s an elusive, fleeting weight on his body and mind. Makes his eyelids heavy. 

He drags his feet home in the plum twilight, sees a light on in the bathroom from the street. 

The door  _ clicks  _ shut gently behind him and the sleepy November sun is already hanging low, low, low in the sky. There’s a muted grey light that fills the still kitchen from the window over the sink when Sam shoulders his way through the door. He can hear the spray from the shower splatter against the basin of the tub and decides not to call out.

Sam heaves a huge sigh and sheds his backpack, jacket, keys and phone as he walks blindly through the apartment, blundering past the light switches until he makes it to the bed and lands heavily onto the mattress.

His breath rattles out of his chest like an engine dying and he lets all the tense muscles in his face and hands and chest go slack and weightless. 

Something cold and wet drops onto Sam’s forehead - once, twice before he’s able to pry his exhausted eyes open.

-

Ms. Petrov is a scribe with the local courthouse, spends all day clicking away dictations and retorts. She has quick fingers and a sharp ear so Sam assumes she took to the job naturally despite the general language barrier. Before she leaves the apartment in the mornings every scarlet hair on her head is laid flawlessly. Her blouses are always tucked in sharp pleats to gem-toned skirts. The back seam on her pantyhose always runs in a straight line. 

Sam finds some old photographs tucked into a hatbox on the top shelf of a closet in the hall. He cracks it open with one ear tracking the sound of her negotiating aggressively with a debt collector over the landline, spiraling cord wrapped from the table next to the door around the corner into the kitchen. Thick photoprint paper with rough, torn edges, annotated and dated in a cyrillic alphabet. She’d been a ballerina once upon a time - pristine form and pointed toes. The black and white photos steal the color from her hair but give the youth of her complexion a soft glow. Potential shone through her eyes, clear in the strength and grace of her posture. 

Sam thinks he sees the ghost of that girl sometimes. Ms. Petrov falls into first position when she’s waiting for water to boil on the stove. Her back foot floats a pendulous counter-point when she bends to pluck up the hair pins that tumble occasionally from her mane. She walks and stands and moves with purpose. 

Living with Ms. Petrov is different from all the other times. 

She does not answer personal questions. She doesn’t really ask them either, which Sam appreciates about her. The brief conversations they exchange over warm salted fish and root vegetables at the dinner table are almost exclusively of literal events from the day, an exchange from the courthouse or Sam’s schoolwork. There’s no television in the living room, just tall, ornate portraits and shelves that host an old radio that she tunes into a different station nightly. 

Sam doesn’t have any baby pictures but he does have a list of words scribbled into the back of his math notebook, ones that Ms. Petrov pulls from the air in courtrooms and radiowaves and brings to him, “What is this word?”

They end most of their evenings together in a comfortable, mutual silence; Sam reading or crouching over his workbooks and Ms. Petrov picking away at a keyboard.

Those same evenings begin with the sharp  _ tick _ ing of her heels on the stairwell up to the third floor apartment. Sam can hear it from the kitchen table; the tempo of the rest of the evening being set. 

He fumbles to set out his math homework, shoving papers to cover over the pentagrams he’d been tracing in the margins of his notebooks and tries to make himself look busy before the door swings open. 

“Sam,” she calls out by way of greeting, too busy with her bags and coats in the front hallway to look up. 

“In the kitchen!” 

Each floor in the townhouse is its own apartment, strung together by a thin thread of stairway. They have upstairs and downstairs neighbors, not that Sam has ever met them; can’t even remember hearing them. Minding your own business seems to be a competitive sport in this neighborhood. Sam doesn’t know a single other thing about any of them and they know even less about him. The Petrov home is a tight two bedrooms crammed into seven hundred square feet, a kitchen that’s all appliances and no counter space packed into the breakfast nook. It’s… cozy. 

There’s enough room on the table for Sam, his notebooks, and the stack of textbooks at his elbow and Ms. Petrov forces space for the small sack of groceries she’s hauled in with her. 

“Fruits,” she nods at the bag. “For your lunches.” Then, without preamble: “Tell me your assignments.”

“I’ve already finished all my reading and answered the essay questions for my history chapters,” he supplies quickly, hoping it sounds impressive. He always starts with his favorites and makes quick work of the readings - enjoys penning down his thoughts afterwards. He thinks that almost anything can be argued about literature and history. Sam loves the subjectivity, that he doesn’t have to be tangibly  _ correct  _ to be valid.

She makes a neutral, acknowledging sound as she goes to the very tips of her toes and starts to pull down pots and pans from their hooks over the shallow basin kitchen sink. 

“And your maths? Algebra?”

He wrinkles his nose. “Starting it now.”

She frowns without looking, the first play of emotion on her face since she walked through the door. 

“One day you will grow up, grow old,” Ms. Petrov says, voice as steady as it ever is. Sam feels his eyes starting to rattle around inside of his eye sockets already. He could recite this speech from memory at this point. “What do you have then? The food you’ve eaten? The clothes I mend you?” She roughly chops carrots and onions, turns on the stove.

“No,” he mumbles into his chin. 

“No,” she agrees curtly. “You will have what cannot be taken. You keep what you  _ know _ , rybka. But this is only if you learn _.  _ Da uzh?” 

Sam gnaws on the inside of his lip and scratches at the corner of his textbooks, chastened. He looked up what ‘rybka’ meant once. She calls him ‘little fish.’ 

Ms. Petrov is not a subjective person. She deals almost exclusively in tangibility and prefers to be  _ correct  _ above all else. She says to Sam that history books cannot be trusted until you look at who has written them. Literature doubly so. 

Sam thinks Ms. Petrov must be the first person who has never lied to him. After a year and a half he still doesn’t know why she isn’t a mother, but he thinks that she would be very good at it. 

__ He finds himself thinking less and less about having to collect spilled pennies and non-perishable food for his next bid for the state line. Sam finds himself not minding his life with Ms. Petrov as much as he minded anything else before. That empty cavern that rips through his stomach sometimes when he sees younger children clinging to their siblings eases up some when she’s around with a guiding hand on his shoulder. 

A song Sam doesn’t know drawn out in a language Sam doesn’t understand crawls through the gap between the bottom of the door and the frame, rings off the walls in the stairwell beyond the threshold. They go still in what they’re doing, Sam with a pencil in his hand and Ms. Petrov with a long wooden spoon in hers. 

The worst thing about living with Ms. Petrov is Mr. Petrov. 

-

Sam’s brain refuses to process what he is seeing, rejects the image outright and glitches, fritzes, misfires. 

Jessica is laying on the ceiling. 

Her body is twisted up unnaturally, knees buckled and contouring upwards. Pallid skin and dark, unseeing eyes loom six feet above his face and Sam’s screaming before he even really understands the gash that’s been slashed open across her belly, dribbling blood down onto the bed. 

Jessica is laying on the ceiling. 

A rolling ocean of horror fills up all of those old, tired molecules of Sam’s being and it drowns out everything that isn’t the weak, slack expression on her face. It bottoms out in his lungs, gurgles up into his throat when he tries to gasp for breath. 

Something sparks, catches, ignites underneath her - above her. The flames eat through the silk of her nightdress instantly, catching her hair with licking yellows and orange glows. Sam can’t hear anything that’s coming out of his throat through the roar of the blaze sucking all the air out of the room, snatching the breath from his lips. The light of it burns his eyes. 

This is it.

This is the nightmare. 

The one that keeps coming back night after night after night. It has to be. It feels so familiar. The dry, hungry heat and the foul, cloying smell of burning hair. Sam is going to wake up with a sore throat and a confused expression any second now, he is going to wake - 

There are rough hands grabbing into him, fisting and twisting into the front of his sweatshirt but Sam can’t see anything anymore through the smoke. He is jostled and jarred and the world starts to turn again, starts to drag him away at double the speed. 

“No!” He screams, means it. He lunges even as he feels himself being hauled toward the narrow entry of the room. 

There are very few things in this world that can make Sam Wesson move when he doesn’t want to. He hooks into the doorframe while he pulls against the grip on his collar and  _ wrenches _ with his arms and his shoulders, forward into the inferno like there’s still some chance to drag her back down, back to life. 

The distance between the bed and the door is short but the heels of his sneakers scuff half moons across the hardwood as he tries to plant his feet. He claws for a grip, finds the bookcase and brings down burning bindings - blistering his bloody hands - but he can't seem to keep his grip on anything, it’s all slipping away so quickly and with so much heat. 

If he is the immovable object then the body underneath of him is the unstoppable force.

Sam puts every fiber of muscle he has in his body directly into staying in this room, screaming as he does, but it doesn’t save him. A solid shoulder barrels into him, through him, and Sam is carried away, away, away from the fire. 

“I gotcha, Sammy,” the force says. “I got ya.” 

-

In the hatbox on the top shelf of the hall closet, underneath the pictures of the graceful ballerinas swathed in layers of sheer white with serene expressions on their faces, is a photo of a man in a uniform. 

Sam had assumed that Mr. Petrov was significantly older than Ms. Petrov from the weathered creases in his brow, the wrinkles carved out from the corners of his nostrils past his chin to the jowly undermeat of his jaw, the firm pouch of belly-fat that extends over his beltline. He sweats constantly, thumbing at his bulbous red nose and snorting damply from the humid cloud that radiates off his skin. 

He had been young once, too. An officer, by the looks of it, with a starched and stiff uniform that cut high on his neck. With a beret riding low on his heavy brow, there was already something flinty in his eye in those photographs. He aged three hard, mean years for every one that Ms. Petrov lived.

Mr. Petrov doesn’t come home most nights - the better nights. Sam can tell that Ms. Petrov doesn’t miss him from the humming songs that warm the back of her throat, the extra half a beat of patience she has when she checks Sam’s math over before sending him to bed. 

But then it happens - once a fortnight or so, preceded by listless, tuneless singing and a heavy, dark atmosphere. Stumbling footsteps coming up the stairs. 

“I will bring dinner to your room tonight,” she says firmly, knocking the wood spoon against the side of the tall-walled stew pot. 

Sam chews on the inside of his lip. The stumbling steps on the stairs gain momentum, getting louder. 

“Now, Sam!” her voice cracks. 

He grabs up his textbook, drags his feet as he watches her fade down the distance of the hallway from the kitchen like there’s some chance that she wasn’t being firm and serious. The door to the bedroom closes behind him with a resolute sort of sound. 

There’s a hesitating moment, just one, where his hand flinches back towards the knob. It ends.

He’s clumsy when he scuffs his shins and wrenches his elbows, jamming his coltish body underneath the twin sized bed frame. It’s been months since he’s been able to cram up into the space comfortably and if the action felt childish before - when he was a small, pathetic ball curled up in the corner - then it’s doubly so when he can barely reign all of his limbs in from the edges of the hanging sheets.

-

Couldn’t say why exactly but Sam walked into his bedroom on a dark November evening in 1996 and something was… different. Shifted. He felt it on his skin. A filmy, gossamer veil of change on the air. The sensation pitted out in his gut, made him curious and restless. 

He checked the windows over first, inspected the frame for a hint before turning his eyes to the bed from across the small room. 

A cardboard box, square and a little smaller than a shoebox. Sat inanimately and innocently underneath the very edge of the bed frame. It hadn’t been there when he moved in, Sam was sure of it because he used the empty space underneath his bed to stash away snack bars and rolls of quarters when he first arrived. 

The box itself was beat and ratty – softened around the corners and edges with the evidence of a use and history before materializing in this room when he pulled it out onto the carpet. Confused, Sam assumed that he must have put it there himself and simply forgot, that he was being silly. 

Ms. Petrov would never come into this room at all if she could avoid it, certainly not without knocking or notice first. Mr. Petrov was never home. So the box must belong to _him_ because, aside from there being no one else to have stashed it there, who else would have even wanted to?

He knew that couldn’t be true as soon as he peered inside. Even if he could forget hiding a box full of cassette tapes underneath his bed Sam knew for a fact that he’d never held a Walkman before in his entire life.

A thrill shot through his heart the exact moment that he realized something actually interesting happened to him. Not just miserable and boring, but  _ intriguing. _ He checked through the rest of his room, pretending to be an inspector from one of the novels on the bookshelves, the ones that taught him that the smallest clue can be the whole undoing of a mystery.

Sam thought he might have noticed that some things have been touched - that red toy car that he’d kept since he was a kid might be flipped up instead of down in the side pocket of his backpack, three books on the shelf that he swore were in a different order than he left them, but that’s it. 

The streetlight outside the window cast just enough light to squint through as Sam spilled out the box. He took his time to organize the tapes out in a grid across the floor in silence, in secret. Six tapes up, six tapes across, thirty six tapes altogether. Thirty-five of them were regular cassette albums with price stickers peeling off of the underside of the cases from shops and stores Sam had never even seen the names of before. Rock, metal, a little bit of country - stuff that Sam had heard of but not heard. He recognized a few from the radio. 

The thirty-sixth tape was a mixtape. 

The tape itself was a generic brand, could have come from anywhere any time between 1964 and now. The stock paper crammed inside the plastic casing was blank on all sides. No cutlist.

With everything all laid out on the ground - the tapes in a grid, the soft-cornered cardboard box, the yellow Walkman with the earphones stretched out - it was easy to see.

Sam hummed ‘ _ One of These Things is Not Like the Others’  _ when he plucked it up, setting the rest of everything to the side except for the Walkman. 

The sun was a memory on the horizon by then, leaving the rest of the night to Sam alone. He crawled into bed, huddled up underneath the comforter with his knees to his chest for the extra shell of privacy. In his own small slice of the world he didn’t know what to expect so he prepared himself for disappointment; took a deep breath and closed his eyes, thumbing down the play button and waited for the music to fill up the blank wall on the inside of his mind’s eye. 

Sam heard the opening riffs to Heart’s  _ Barracuda  _ for the first time at 11:39pm on a school night and it was a biblical experience. 

The galloping guitar, the squeal-out - it caught in his chest, in his throat. His breath hitched up hard and tight next to his heart, tripped up in the thrum and the  _ noise  _ of it hitting him in the sternum like a mallet. It zinged and vibrated through his skeleton. 

_ So!  _ \- the vocals cut in, short and delightful -  _ this ain't the end, I saw you again! Today, I had to turn my heart away. _

Sam’s eyes split open.

It was from Someone.  _ The  _ Someone that lives somewhere. The one that misses Sam.

The thought crossed his mind and he believed it as a zealot in the same moment, lit up from the inside outwards like a christmas light. The song continued to hurtle forward through the headphones - _ If the real thing don’t do the trick you better make up something quick! - _ while Sam trembled all over with excitement.

He cracked the plastic open again as the music pumped straight into his spine, pressed his nose against the paper inside and wondered with a glowing delight where the iron smell came from. 

He didn’t sleep. He listened through to the end of the tape until the tracks ran out and the mechanical whirring of the circuit filled the empty space underneath Sam’s sheets. He rewound it, hit play again. 

The box was the first good secret Sam ever had. The only people in the entire world that knew about it were him and whoever put it there. 

A mystery. A puzzle. A  _ case.  _ Something to chew on. 

The box itself wasn’t a huge clue. Sam researched how to track the serial numbers off the barcodes from the underside. It took him three days staying late at the school library just to figure out the box was made for the express purpose of holding other, smaller boxes from an industrial manufacturer out of Florida. He even went the extra mile to dig around into what the manufacturer actually produces but the list is too long - farming equipment to ammunition. 

The same trick didn’t work for the stickers he could still make out on the underside of some of the cassette cases. They were all manufactured in Indonesia and sent over here, no line of where ‘here’ was originally. 

Untraceable, untrackable, Sam had to fill in the blanks himself. He told himself the narrative like a bedtime story, curled up in the cold under a cloak of blankets. Every night he listened through The Rolling Stones, Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne and dreamed. 

He wondered what they smell like. What their arms would feel like, holding Sam close. He hugged himself when he imagined. 

He wrote the bedtime story based on every novel he’s ever read, wrote in the mystery and fantasy and suspense while listening to the tapes late at night. With his eyes screwed shut and his covers pulled up over his head, he wrote in excuses for reasons why they didn't take him away.

It lulled Sam into pleasant dreams. 

But none of that is real. 

What’s real is him, here, now, crammed up with his back against the wall underneath the bed in a cramped apartment in Rochester, New York with headphones on. He twists the volume up as loud as he can handle to muffle out the sounds of the argument that rises like a swell down the hall, clamps his hands down over top and cringes. 

He’s tried to track the train of their arguments before with his ear pressed up against the door. They never fight in English so he has to put together the context of their conflicts from the tones and cadences of their voices. Ms. Petrov is staccato - short, direct responses in a gravely cold tone and Mr. Petrov is legato - rounded and long, spieling rambles that get louder and more suffocating the longer he slurs out his grievances. 

He used to wonder if they were arguing about the drinking or the gambling or the smears of lipstick he can see on Mr. Petrov’s collar when he builds up the courage to peek out of a crack in his bedroom door. 

Ms. Petrov wears silk scarves around her neck most mornings after they scream themselves hoarse. Every red hair on her head laid perfectly, makeup powdered on to cover over welted fingerprints. 

The sounds of one song fades out into another and Jimmy Page slams a fat, pouncing guitar lick right into Sam’s eardrums. He squeezes his eyes closed hard enough that it hurts and tries so hard, for the hundredth thousandth time, to imagine the person that would have wanted to give him  _ Good Times, Bad Times  _ as a gift. 

_ In the days of my youth I was told what it means to be a man! _

_ And now I’ve reached that age I’ve tried to do all those things the best I can! _

A  _ thunk  _ over the snaring kickdrum rattles the wall against his spine and startles Sam hard enough to crack his forehead off the boxspring.

“Shit,” he hisses pain as he crawls back out from under the bed army style, squinting with the one eye he almost knocked into. He knuckles at the spot as he comes to his feet, tugs the headphones off his ears onto his collar bones. The echo of the music keeps pumping but louder than that, a shouted word, the clatter of dishes on the kitchen floor. 

And then there is nothing. 

_ I know what it means to be alone!  _

_ I sure do wish I was at ho- _

He thumbs down the pause button against his hip and the music stops altogether.

The shouting is gone and the absence is deafening, ringing in the hollow space between his ears. The air in the apartment is thick and cold. 

He feels gawky and adolescent all at once, alone in the bedroom that he’s slept in consistently for the longest amount of time in his life. He is small and childish and pathetic for his fantasies and imaginings of a someone - for thinking that he was somehow more special than any other kid that he’s shared meals and space with over the last ten years. 

What’s real is this: 

Sam was abandoned at Strong Memorial Hospital in 1987. The forwarding addresses and phone numbers his father left lead nowhere and he never returned to claim Sam in court. 

Ann Wilson wrote  _ Barracuda  _ in 1977 about her disenchantment with the music industry.

There is a flesh and blood and bone woman on the other side of that door and all actual verifiable evidence points to her being the only person in this entire world that thinks about him when he’s not in the room. 

She is real. 

She is here, now. 

What kind of boy is he?

The door is tall on the other side of the room and the hallway is long but Sam clears the distance faster than he can really process why. He’s like a shark, if he stops moving he’ll lose his nerve so he keeps his feet and his body pumping. 

The first thing that he can get his hands on in the length of the hallway toward the kitchen is the answering machine - takes the jack out of the wall and a bit of the plaster when he rips it straight off the table in one violent movement. He tests the weight in his hand, heaves it in one palm as he shoulders through the door in the kitchen. The argument itself doesn't matter - there is no context or pretext or subtext that would put him in any other position. 

Mr. Petrov can’t see him, back to the door, shoulders hunched underneath a dirty undershirt. He’s too immersed with the task on hand to notice the boy he’s barely noticed before, both of his meaty mitts wrapped around the throat of his bride. Ms. Petrov’s face is nearly as red as her hair, tears and snot smearing as she scrabbles her crimson fingernails against the lock of his thick fingers. 

Sam raises the recorder over his head, arches as high and as tall as he can and sees the reflection of himself in the glossy wet of Ms. Petrov’s eyes - the fear, the horror. She draws blood she scratches so hard.

I’m brave, Sam thinks.

Every ounce of worth that he has in his body Sam puts into his shoulders, his biceps, his back. He brings himself to the full extent of his height with the machine held up and then heaves it down over the crown of Mr. Petrov’s skull with a  _ crack.  _ He builds up enough force to split the plastic casing and spill the cogs and guts of the machine all over the kitchen floor. It clatters apart between his fingers, deteriorating.

Ms. Petrov gasps for air in a savage, primal pull that leaves her coughing deeply from her diaphragm and sucking as Mr. Petrov’s grip loosens.

There’s blood already everywhere, splattered on the floor and dripping down through Mr. Petrov’s hair, his forehead, his eyebrows. He blunders backwards, fumbles stiffly to the ground on already unsteady, drunken feet. He probably doesn’t even feel half the pain that he should through the liquor and adrenaline and he goes down slowly, the way huge animals are prone to do - to his knees and then all fours. 

Sam doesn’t care about him. 

He’s already on the floor, close enough to feel the texture of her ruined chiffon dress underneath his palms and he’s saying, “Ms. Petrov, Ms. Petrov,” because he doesn’t have anything else to call her to try and get her attention in moments like this. His hands are shaking, high on  _ doing something _ and she can only splutter, finally getting some of the air to stick inside her lungs. 

The heel of her palm strikes out onto his shoulder and she clutches in reassuring pulses before she’s shoving, panicking. 

Sam has never been hit in the face before. He doesn’t see it coming. 

When Mr. Petrov’s closed fist connects into the edge of Sam’s jaw it sends his teeth cracking together with a deafening force that reverberates through his sinuses and rattles the jellied nerves behind his eyeballs. The sound of knucklebones and jawbones and the tissues trapped in between cements itself forever in association with the flavor of blood and the smell of the hearty stew simmering away on the stovetop. 

Sam falls in a corkscrew, tangled up in the cord of the headphones.

Everything is weightless and unreal in that spiraling instant. Sam is too shocked to even feel the pain until his chin  _ crack _ s off the linoleum floor and his brain slams around on the inside of his skull like a car crash. 

Time skips a second - a record needle bouncing off a vinyl. The moment gets eaten up by a strobing starburst of light and agony and he’s back again the second afterward, gasping and grating as the needle screeches back on track further down the line. The overhead light hurts his eyes, pieces of shattered plastic gouge into his chest.

His cheek sticks to the linoleum flooring as he drools pink and orange deliriously, croaking for a gasp of thin air and trying to focus his eyes on one spot, any spot that he can get. He can’t lock it in. Nothing feels real. The corners of the ceiling and the floor won't stay still.

Palm down to the ground, Sam tries to catch up, keep going, take some weight but then there’s another jump, another white-light wormhole paved with pain that deposits him a second further in the future with a throbbing head. 

The moment is gone forever, the same way that those first three years are. Irreplaceable. It’s never even there.

Time starts back again with the a resounding  _ gong  _ \- the echoing din of the stewpot bouncing off the floor next to his ear because while Sam was time travelling, Ms. Petrov was catching her breath and her fury. 

She has hurled the freshly simmering stewpot off the stove and straight into her husband’s chest. A scalding droplet spatters Sam’s cheek, burns searing hot against his marble cold skin, but it’s nothing compared to Mr. Petrov’s neck and chest and arms and face. 

Sam can’t move but Ms. Petrov is already moving fast enough for both of them.

Small, sharp points underneath his arms, levering him upright - she’s so much stronger than she looks. She’s already hauling and dragging him up and away from the screaming and the steaming. She shouts, “Move!” 

The north star, she is going to take him somewhere safe. 

Ms. Petrov conquers the corner into the hall like a titan, with her teeth bared and her breath hissing. Grunting through her nose as she hauls, it sends a trickle of blood smattering over her sweaty lip. From a dazed, subsurface space underneath the pillowy pain Sam sees that her perfectly sculpted hair is undone, loose in chunks around her temples. A blood vessel in her left eye has ruptured, another shade of scarlet clouding up towards the grey. 

He thinks that he’ll always remember her like this. Not the thousands of perfect moments before with the pleated pants and the pincurls. He’ll remember the rage and the blood and the love in her eyes.

It’s a few stuttering steps for Sam to get his wits about him, the shooting stars and bright lights clattering around inside his skull settling back down slowly. Knees, feet, elbows, and hips; it feels like too many joints and he stumbles forward like a claymation figurine on a grainy television screen. Without the heels on, Sam is as tall as Ms. Petrov. He used to just come up to her eyebrows.

The groaning rises from the kitchen behind them, follows down the hall and Ms. Petrov stops stuttering along and starts to shove - sends Sam stumbling ahead with a sudden, surfacing strength.

Sam blunders forward, gets confused about which direction is which. The hallway tips to one side like a capsizing ship. The headphone cord is wrapped around his neck. 

“Bedroom!” she tries to shout loud enough to penetrate through the swelling daze clouding the corners of Sam’s vision, voice hoarse and cracking in her throat. 

Mr. Petrov hits the hallway after them like a train wreck, a volcanic eruption. The sound of it reverberates around inside Sam’s hollow skull like a gunshot and he sees, like he’s watching it all happen from behind his own shoulder, in another world. The man blunders into the wall, smearing stew and blood and the salty juices from his blistered shoulders. He rucks up the hall carpet as he takes the corner too hard, redirecting with swinging arms and stiff legs. He froths at the mouth as he screams and spits. The noises coming out of him aren't words anymore, just growls and animal snarling. 

The strobe of light shrinks in, steals another second away from Sam. 

He comes back to a second crack of knuckles, something in his nose twisting impossibly, bursting. It hurts more and less than the first one, somehow. The tender meat of his upper lip tears against his own teeth as he is rocked again. The flavor floods his tongue, drains into the back of his throat and up into his sinuses when he coughs and splutters.

He hits the ground the second time in as many minutes, a clattering bag of bones. The spring clip that keeps the Walkman hooked to his hip snaps at the joint. 

Sam can’t catch his breath through his mouth, heart hammering away in his chest and pumping the blood hot and fast from the gashes over his nose and twisting up his lips. Arms up to cover his head on instinct, Sam’s shoulders and hips and stomach are stomped on. 

Raw and welted all over, it hurts more than anything ever has before - the rulers and the punishments and the scorning. 

Tip tilting vision, he cannot see her, can’t find where she went. He tries to call out but can’t find enough air. The center of the world twists, Sam’s stomach lurches. He’s going to die in Rochester, New York. 

The hazy white ring of light whizzes around the edges of Sam’s peripherals again. It whines and zips by, greedy, and it steals another second of his life away when a boot lands over his ribs. 

He wonders what Someone would be doing right now. If they would still hold him with blood on his face. 

The old man holds his burnt arms out at the elbow like a heave-chested gorilla as he kicks with heavy boots. He punts the cracked cassette player against the wall - shatters the case. The mixtape unspools in a tumble of spiraling tape down the length of the rest of the carpet. 

Sam stretches for the ribbon with the last fume of life in his body.

The blurring light reaches the very center of his field of vision and he falls backwards from his body into a dark, behind place where the pain dulls away and he can dream of warm hands pressing the slick hair off of his forehead. 

-

The active, aware part of Sam’s consciousness slides backwards into his skull on a smooth pane of glass. He slips away into a cold, faraway pool of water that numbs his fingers and toes. 

“Are you okay?” 

Screaming in his ear. 

“Sammy! Can you move?”

No one has called him Sammy in years.

Firm, digging fingertips on his chin, on his cheeks and his face is being forcibly angled to look directly into steady green eyes. Sam doesn’t know where he is, couldn’t tell you if he were sitting, standing, or lying flat on his back. Shallow, heaving breaths wrack his chest. He trembles all over. He smells the smoke and charred hair on his clothes and looks into those green eyes and hangs on by one last, singular thread. 

“Your pupils are huge,” the man says. “You’re in shock. We gotta go.”

-

They take Sam away on a Sunday. He’s much less shitty about it than usual, something he knows his case worker notices.

It had taken longer than he thought it would for anyone to realize that Mr. Petrov wasn’t going to wash up from some watering hole in need of a good dry-out. Enough time for their bruises to fade from black to green to yellow. Enough time to wash the walls in the hallway. 

A cigarette vendor at the Finger Lakes racetrack is actually the first one to ask the question out loud, “Hey! Has anybody seen that fuckin’ Russian prick?” 

Sam doesn’t know where Mr. Petrov is. Ms. Petrov tells him to not worry about where Mr. Petrov is. Ms. Petrov tells him that Mr. Petrov will never be coming back. He had asked more questions from his bed over the next few days but Ms. Petrov only says, “You are a smart boy, Sam.” 

Sam used to think that was true. 

“You will be a good boy,” Ms. Petrov says, squaring off the shoulders of Sam’s t-shirt with picking fingers and avoiding looking him directly in the face. This close he can see the tiny fissures in her mask, the worried wrinkles next to her eyes. “You will go to a good family, a good school. Study hard and be a good man.”

Sam swallows thickly, shifts uncomfortably on his feet and feels his case worker’s eyes heavy on the back of his neck. 

She holds him at arm’s length, takes him in with a rawness that makes Sam ache. Ms. Petrov was right, of course - as she always is - that Sam doesn’t get to keep these things. 

The only thing that can never be taken away from him is what he knows. 

The mixtape is gone. By the time that Sam was able to stand on his own feet the hallway had been stripped bare of the carpet and, presumably, everything that had been on top of it. He mourns and heals at the same time, turns over what to do about the hole in his chest for a few days before retiring everything except three tapes - _Led Zeppelin II_ , Creedence Clearwater Revival’s _Chronicle,_ and Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits. He keeps them in the same pocket as the toy car but stops imagining that they came to him on purpose. He doesn’t have a way to listen to them, anyway. 

Everything else has gone the way of the rest of Sam’s childhood. Jettisoned to keep the garbage bag he drags behind him between houses light. 

“I am sorry, rybka.”

“Don’t,” Sam says quickly, breath hitching in his throat. “Don’t be.” 

He wishes he could have been bigger. Stronger. He wishes that he could have done more. 

He wishes that he was the one that killed Mr. Petrov. 

Sam wants to be warm, inside, listening to the radio. He wants to sleep in his own bed tonight. It’s real and it’s right there and he could have it if things were different, if he could have done something more or smarter or better. 

His face starts to crumple and she pulls him in, closer than she ever has before. A hand on the back of his head, the other across his shoulders - she smells of powdery perfume and the soap from the kitchen sink. 

In 1998 a condo developer purchases the three square blocks that the sooty brick buildings sit on in Rochester and compels the current residents to relocate. Sam never sees Ms. Petrov again. 

-

Tuesday mornings have honestly never been the best for Sean Patrick Murphy. Most people got beef with Mondays, but not Sean. He got the nickname ‘Bostey’ on a Tuesday morning. His parents told him they were getting a divorce on a Tuesday morning.

This Tuesday morning in particular has been a real punch in the nads. His roommate, Kenny, the dumb drunk bastard, sleepwalks - and this morning happened to stumble himself right out of bed and over to Sean’s closet, which he mistook for a urinal. Sean’s out here with his church clothes on, starchy collar rashin’ up his whole neck because his sneakers are full of piss. 

He’d tried to snag some breakfast from the cafe with his student card before heading out but the machine had been down. Sean had enough spare change to scrounge together for a coffee, which promptly spilled onto his lap after boarding the bus. 

His dick smells like hazelnut dark roast and he’s got a bad attitude. 

It’s been a week exactly since his TA in English Comp pulled him off to the side. Allison, Allie, is her name and she’s a stone cold fox. Sean was hoping that she called him out to ask him some questions about what his plans are for the rest of the day - but it was a Tuesday morning so she was actually just calling him over to tell him his writing is shit.

“Here,” she said shortly, uncapping a pen and jotting down a few short lines of information onto a notecard. “The tutoring center. Ask for Sam Wesson. He’s a whiz with this sort of stuff. He’s from your neck of the woods, too. Syracuse or something, I think.”

“Oh yeah?” Sean said instead of pointing out that Syracuse and Boston are barely similar at all. “You know him?”

She shrugged, a lazy shoulder. “A couple years. He does a lot of work with the department. I think he’s pre-law though.”

A couple years she’s known this guy and she doesn’t know for sure where he’s from or what he’s studying? Sean scoffed. She’s less hot than she was a minute ago.

The only tutoring session available on Sam Wesson’s schedule for weeks was 8:00am Tuesday morning. Because, y’know, fuck Tuesdays. And fuck Sam Wesson for even having an 8:00am, now that he’s thinking about it. 

He walks past the library the first pass around, has to hoof it back once he realizes his mistake. Fuckin’ California, everything looks the goddamn same. Where’s the character? The gothic arches and the Catholic Fear? 

His feet hurt from slapping around in his dress shoes and the broad at the front desk doesn’t look happy to see him.

“Hey, uh,” he ducks to read her nameplate, “Lenore. I’m here for tutoring.” 

“What’s your name?” She looks down her nose, past her glasses to the computer. 

“Sean Patrick Murphy.” He leans up against the counter on one elbow, crosses his legs at the ankle. It’s all three names or none with him, there are too many Sean Murphys in this world. 

“Hm.” She frowns, makes her look older than she actually is. “Could it be under something else?” 

Sean rolls his eyes, keeps a frustrated sigh behind his sternum. “Do you see Bostey?”

“Oh!” She perks up, and then, “...Oh.” 

“Oh?  _ Oh?  _ I don’t like that ‘Oh,’ Lenore.” He peers over the counter, tries to get a good view at her computer screen. A whole bar of the spreadsheet has been highlighted a bright red, Bostey Murphy in the 8:00am time slot. 

“I’m so sorry,” Lenore holds a soothing hand to her own throat, blinking rapidly. “We meant to call, it’s just been so hectic since we found out.”

“Found out?” Sean repeats blankly. 

“Your tutor, Sam Wesson?” She shakes her head to herself solemnly. “His apartment burned down Sunday night. They’re still going through the remains, but they’ve already found his girlfriend and think that it’s just a matter of time before...” She swallows gravely. 

“Are you shittin’ me?” Sean reads her face for a serious beat, jaw dropped open. “You’re bein’ serious? Of all the crazy fuckin’...” he trails off as her face gets pinched up around the corners. 

The Murphy clan is good at two things - fucking and dying, mostly in that order. Sean has seven brothers and sisters, sixteen uncles and aunts, and with the birth of a second cousin four weeks ago the numbers are rounding out in the upper fifties. 

Sean doesn’t even remember the first funeral he attended, dressed up in a tiny three-piece suit his great aunt stitched for just the occasion. He hasn’t gone eighteen months in his entire life without hearing somebody close to him, or somebody close to somebody close to him, dropping dead. 

Death is, at the core, the punchline to a long joke that people tell while standing around your stiff body. The warm crush of a crowd that loves and misses you, the smell of spirits and toasting to a life well lived, well wrought. The young ones - those are the worst. The most senseless and difficult to sort out. There are never enough stories to tell. 

“I’m so sorry for ya loss,” Sean says, somber, affected. Feels uncomfortable that he’s more dressed for a funeral than she is. “Were you and he close?”

She shakes her head as she swipes at her eyes. “Not really. We’d eat lunch together sometimes. He was really nice.” 

“Did he just start around here?” Sean asks. People love to be asked questions at a wake. The grief needs to be upheaved, borne to the world and the sun for brightness and clarity. To dry it out.

She shakes her head again. “Four years, I think.” 

Sean frowns. “Oh, so you musta just started around here?” 

She shakes her head again, hasn’t stopped shaking her head since mentioning the fire. “Three years.” 

The way out of the library is shorter than the way in. Sean feels numb and surprised. Now that he knows he starts to notice the buzz zinging through the people loitering around on campus, their hushed voices and nervous stares. Mortality is on the lips and minds of all these children. 

He hears a lot about Jessica Moore over the next week. She was a sharp lady, from the sound of it. Excelled academically, but more than that. Loved to laugh and sing and dance. Funny, compassionate, she is described as creative, captivating, inspiring. The local bars are full of commiseration. They trade lost instances with a beautiful girl like precious gems. Sean learns her favorite music and movies, hears jokes that she used to tell and stories that made her cry. 

He asks about Sam’s favorite music. Nobody knows. 

It’s the saddest thing he’s ever even thought about. 

No body. No mourners. No family. No funeral. Nothing left at all. 

He turns it over in his mind again and again, drinking alone at night. He can’t be out at those bars right now, couldn’t stand to hear another story with a boy shaped hole in the center. 

“To Sam.” Sean lifts the bottle up in the air, a short toast because he’s afraid no one else has thought to do it. “Wherever the fuck he ended up.” 


	3. Homer, GA

There’s a bagel shop in La Honda and Dean’s sure that the bagels themselves are shit - he’s had a bagel in every state of the contiguous US and California barely ranks top fifteen; should probably even leave the entire business to the East Coast to be honest. But maybe Sam likes bagels, y’know? 

Dean sure as hell doesn’t know. 

He looks over the display case and wonders, if Sam even likes bagels, what kind of bagels does Sam like? Is he a plain puritan, an everything man? Maybe he likes jalapenos. Maybe he hates bagels. It feels like a test. 

Dean’s eyes skip over to the donut display. 

“Hey, mister,” the gangly teen behind the counter drolls out nasally. “If you need more time to decide your order can you please step to the side so I can assist another customer?”

“Sorry, I’m ready,” Dean says quickly. “Can I get a baker’s dozen and can you just throw whatever bagels you like in there and…. Uh, lets see. Are you guys known for anything?”

“Known for something?” the kid repeats slowly, monotone.

“Yeah, you know - something you make that people really like, they keep coming back for it.” He scratches at his chin, ignores the heated glares from the three people behind him in line. 

The kid drones out a long, “Uhh,” rolling over the question in his mind for a long, considerate moment that Dean honestly appreciates. “People really seem to like our fritters?”

“And two fritters, please.”

The beverage cooler at the end of the line is an entire other affair and Dean’s total ends up being over $50.00 accounting for the coffees, the juices, the bagels, the fritters, and the four breakfast burritos that he panic-orders immediately before cashing out. The pocketfuls of tiny half n’ halfs and Domino sugar packets are free, though.

He’s been to see Sam eleven times over the past four years. Whenever he wanted to and whenever he could. He’d just been struck by the urge, the want last week. Needed to see Sam’s Colorado-morning face looking clean and happy to make six more months of gore and gloominess worth living before he headed back east. He has to hit the brakes any time his mind starts to wander, starts to wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t been here. It’s not productive. There’s only forward. 

The drive back to the motel is simultaneously over in an instant and drags out for eternity. He hoped that the perfect thing to say would just materialize in his mind, fully formed and exceptional before he unlocks the door to the motel room; and that could even be true still if he keeps hesitating with the key. 

It has to be sometime and it might as well be right now. 

“Je- _ sus. _ ” Dean falters on his way back through the crack in the door. “Christ?” 

The place is torn to shreds - Dean’s clothes and toiletries, books and pens and bloody bandages strewn all over like something wild and feral ripped through the bags frantically, kicking everything into the air to shower back down. The overhead fan totters unevenly like a book or a shoe or a lamp knocked a blade off kilter. 

Sam is crouched at the farthest point of the room, on his knees behind the single bed. He is very awake and very agitated, if the gun pointed square at Dean’s chest is anything to go on. 

If Dean thought he looked his fill last night when Sam was dead weight, close enough that he could make out the soft textures of his skin and the circuit of his breathing - it doesn’t hold a candle to the thing lit up and moving. The inverse of the moment in that breakfast joint, all of Sam’s focus and acknowledgement but none of the bright morningness of him. Twelve feet and a pistol between him and Sam.

Dean knows that Sam has never actually held a gun before by the way he keeps squeezing his eyes shut, shaking his head, fingers twitching and uncertain along the ivory handle. 

“What,” Sam shouts, voice coarse, “the  _ fuck  _ is going on?” 

Dean can’t imagine. Like literally doesn’t think that he’s creative enough to even imagine what Sam could be thinking right now. The horrors of the night before and then waking up here - just some motel room somewhere - instead of a hospital. 

He steps all the way into the room and knocks the door closed with the heel of his boot on the way.

“I’m gonna put the bagels and the coffee down,” he says slowly and then reliably does just that. He stays faced forward, attempting to project a core of calmness while Sam winces, braces his arms harder into holding the pistol forward with stretched shoulders and locked elbows. 

Sam blinks around the room, rocking anxiously between his knees as he processes everything all at once. Dean holds still, practices his breathing, practices  _ his patience.  _

Sam had passed out in the front seat of the car before they had even crossed out of Palo Alto, eyes rolling back in his head with his breath coming shallowly. His hands were a wreck, second degree burns across his trembling palms and twisting up his fingers. The smell made Dean cough and cover his own mouth and he was glad to be able to rinse it from Sam’s palms after dragging him through the threshold of the motel room he’d been set up in for the past two days. 

It had been tedious and gruesome work, cleaning and wrapping Sam’s hands in the wee hours of the morning. Probably for the best that he wasn’t around to feel it at the time but Sam’s not doing himself any favors now, squeezing his fists as tight as he can get around the handle of the Colt M1911A1 Dean shouldn’t have left in his duffle. Blood spots through the gauzy wrapping, pools and drips from the clutching joints of his knuckles. 

It’s Dean’s fault, he shouldn’t have left him alone, had assumed after the night Sam had he’d stay passed out through at least to ten. John wouldn’t have made the same mistake, would have probably lashed Sam’s wrists to the bed frame before he left, would have thought to take the bags with him. 

But John’s not here. 

Sam is here. 

Sam shakes his head out, dark hair whipping around his face and Dean imagines he’s trying to knock some logic loose. “What _ is  _ all of this stuff?”

Journals and research, books on the occult splayed open to pages of twisted birds and runes. Logs and ledgers, suspicious events and activities across the country that John had been tracking over the years - one of his father’s thousands of eyes looming over small towns in faraway places, reading their local news and prowling the edges of their peripherals.

“I’m gonna answer your questions,” Dean assures, placates, creeps another silent step forward. “But you gotta promise me that you’re gonna stay cool.” 

“I am cool!” Sam lies loudly. 

Dean knows that Sam has never held a gun before from how easy it is to take it away from him. 

Sam falls back on his ass between the bed and the wall and Dean lets out the breath he was holding from the other side of the mattress, thumbing down the hammer and ejecting each bullet from the back end of the chamber one after another in rapid  _ clickclickclickclickclick _ . They bounce off the floor and the toes of his boots and Dean bares his teeth in a short, frustrated pull of his mouth. 

“This is not a toy! You could have seriously hurt yourself.” He dismantles the slide off the frame and the barrel from the spring for good measure, puts the gun into as many pieces as it can get. “Do you even know how long it took to do your hands last night?”

“What?” Sam breathes out his third question of the morning, brow crunched up in desperate confusion and eyes wide in small fear. 

“The burns.” Dean gestures to Sam’s seeping red hands. “C’mon, sit. I’m going to have to re-wrap ‘em.” 

Sam squints at him like he can’t be real. 

_ “Who are you?”  _

-

Sam wakes up confused. The first few moments he spends surfacing to consciousness he doesn’t know what year it is, the age of his body. He thinks he might be a little boy, taking up too little space and too much all at once. In a small room, unnaturally alone. He feels and knows that he is young and scared. This is not his bed. This is not his home.  _ Someone  _ is coming to get him.  _ Someone  _ is coming. They have a name and Sam can almost remember it in the dream he’s having before reality clicks into perspective and the hurt pierces him through the chest like a mounted butterfly. A wounded sound punches clean out of his stomach, rasping in his raw throat.

Waking up in a strange room with a strange world just outside the curtains - Sam feels like the nightmare he’s been having for months started and the Sam that was dreaming, the real him with his head laying in his normal bed in another universe must have died and now this Sam -  _ he  _ Sam - is stuck, trapped forever. 

He gets himself upright and moving as quickly as he can, unsteady on his feet as his stomach roils and his hands sear. The sleeves of his sweater have been sheared off at the elbow - raw and uneven edges that are grimy and stained brown with his own blood. Gauze wraps down each of his forearms, covering over where it stings; it plasters three of the fingers on his right hand and two on his left. 

He goes for the window first, checks the scene, doesn’t think that he’s in Palo Alto anymore from the amount of lush greenery he can see. His elbow brushes against the sill, disturbs a thick white line of grainy particles. His brow crushes together as he elbows the line again, disrupts it. Sugar? Salt? 

His hands ache and his head throbs but he needs  _ answers _ wherever he can get them. 

One bed. 

One bed in the room but the towels in the bathroom are crumpled up on the counter, visibly damp. There’s an electric green toothbrush hanging over the lip into the sink. The chair to the desk is out, angled so that it faces the one bed. 

He whips his head around, a thousand details to take in all at once like his life depends on it, the hole in his chest, the searing pain in his palms.

He goes straight for the bed next, checks up underneath the fallen skirts and hits paydirt - a duffle. 

The blisters and scabs crack open when he jerks open the zipper, breath coming hot and choppy in his chest. The nightmare was supposed to end when the fire claimed the bedroom, was supposed to take him with it. 

He gets bloody fingerprints all over the fistfuls of cotton t-shirts and old receipts he drags out from the main compartment, tips it over and shakes out the shoes, boxer briefs, flip phone,  _ a fucking gun.  _

Sam snatches it up as soon as it hits the carpet, hands shaking, adrenaline and pain altogether. 

What the fuck? What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck?

Whose room? Where? What happened,  _ what is happening? _

Books. There are books in the side pouches and Sam rips them out into the open, flays the spines open to the sunlight and the mystery deepens with each word - occult sciences, a bestiary with illustrations, a journal stuffed -  _ stuffed -  _ with newspaper clippings and crude images of fangs and claws. There are symbols scored into the dense leather on the back of the notebook, pictograms he doesn’t recognize. He whips them away almost as quickly as he can put eyes on them, needs the bizarreness to be as far away as possible. 

He stops pawing and starts pitching, hurling.

Jessica was laying on the ceiling. Jessica was laying on the ceiling. 

Cell phone. Sam flips it open with his teeth quickly, feels the invisible pressure of an empty room. Whoever left the phone is coming back for it at some point. 

11 MISSED CALLS

6 VOICE MESSAGES

4 TEXT MESSAGES

He fumbles trying to press the central enter key with his gauzy fingers, accidentally opens the thread of unread text messages. 

(785)0549936: 

6:34AM:

WHERE ARE YOU?

7:05AM:

ON THE ROAD

7:11AM:

ANSWER THE PHONE

8:17AM:

CALL ME BACK NOW

The noise of the key in the lock startles the phone out of Sam’s hands and has him twisting rug burn into his knees when he points the muzzle of the gun at the door.

He doesn’t know what to expect to come through the other side so he prepares himself to be terrified, locks the form of himself into place so that he won't tremble. 

The man that passes through the threshold of the door is taller, cleaner, more surprised to see him than Sam could have imagined. 

He is dressed in rich tones - dark undershirt, deep red overshirt, military cut jacket. He stands out sharply against the brief cut of the outside world Sam can see behind him when he presses his head and the paper bag filling up the cradle of his right arm through the crack in the door. The smell of coffee swells in with him.

“Je- _ sus. _ ” He takes in the new mess for a startled half a second, coming up short in the doorway with his mouth gaped open. He’s young, can’t be more than a few years older than Sam. His hair is a beachy, honey color that sits rumpled up and untidy, makes him look even younger. “Christ?”

“What,” Sam barks, voice gravelly from all the soot clotting up his lungs. “The  _ fuck  _ is going on?” 

Eyes on him, something tickles the back of Sam’s mind in the expression on the man’s face. Like something that he’s seen in a dream before, in a nightmare, before he recognizes the serious, concerned emotion from the night before. 

The man that pulled him out of the fire. 

Sam feels half the immediate panic and double the frantic confusion. 

“I’m gonna put the bagels and the coffee down,” the man says, gentle and easing in his tone - like he’s got guns pointed at him all the time and this is just another regular morning. 

Sam’s hands are shaking, he can’t help it. His eyes skitter around the edges of the room again with his arms braced firmly between himself and the man setting the coffee down on the table next to the door. He breathes in choppy pulls, trying to put something that he can use together from the collection of effects on the ground, the string of text messages he’d just read through. “What is all of this stuff?” 

“I’m gonna answer your questions,” the guy assauges with this reassuring, soothing tone like  _ Sam  _ is the one going crazy here. “But you gotta promise me that you’re gonna stay cool.” 

“I am cool!” Sam realizes too late that the man is no longer on the other side of the room. 

A firm hand smothers over the barrel of the gun, twists the pistol up and out of Sam’s grip in a practiced, disarming motion that sends Sam sprawling into a small pile of laundry he tore out of the bag earlier. The smearing red handprint on the wall looks childish, a finger painting. 

The guy snorts from his nose, shakes his head out like a stamping bull while he disassembles the firearm with thoughtless mechanics. “This is not a toy!” he intones, like he’s  _ chastising  _ Sam. “You could have seriously hurt yourself.” The bullets go rattling to the floor scattering in every direction. He tosses the spring and the top compartment and the handle off to the side in separate pieces when he’s done, frowns with his mouth and his brow. “Do you even know how long it took to do your hands last night?”

“What?” Sam feels so small and so stupid sitting on the ground, can’t keep up with any of the absurdness that has happened since 8:23pm yesterday. 

“Your hands,” the guy emphasizes, points directly to where Sam is smearing blood all over his own lap. “C’mon, sit. I’m gonna have to re-wrap them.” 

This is the second most surreal moment of Sam’s life. 

“ _ Who are you?”  _

If Sam didn’t know any better he’d say the guy winces, but as soon as it’s there it is gone again and he’s smiling with his teeth bared. 

“My name is Dean,” he says. “Winchester.” 

The name doesn’t mean anything to Sam. He crams himself up against the wall as far as he can get. “Where are we?” 

“Can we talk while I bandage your hands?” Dean asks instead of answering him, which doesn’t put Sam any more at ease. He catches the flighty flash in Sam’s eye, eases up with his posture and hands. “We’re in La Honda. About a half hour outside Palo Alto. Sit?”

Sam sits stiffly on the edge of the bed when Dean turns his back, picking around at the items on the floor for the first aid pack Sam chucked in that direction. He wheels the chair from the desk around to crowd the bed and sits with his knees bracketing Sam’s on either side, close enough that the creases in the denim scrape. 

Sam can’t control the trembling of his hands when he eases them down, hesitating for a moment before making the conscious decision to trust. 

“What happened to Jessica?” he chokes on her name. She was warm and alive and she was just there, he was holding her, and now she isn’t. “Did you see what happened?”

“I didn’t see what happened to your girlfriend.” Dean unwinds the bandages from Sam’s fingers with unnerving ease, like he’s done it before. The soaked gauze peels from the raw, red wounds and he grinds his teeth to keep the whining noises locked up in his esophagus. The pain pushes forward to the front of his focus now that the immediate zest of adrenaline is abandoning him. 

A broken blister, Sam has to look away with a churning stomach. The grime of the evening is still clinging to his skin in a fine soot. He’ll have to wash it from the roots of his hair and that seems too normal to be real. He missed his law school interview. 

“The cops are gonna want to talk to me,” he realizes out loud.

A wince of an expression strokes over Dean’s face. Their knees bump together. 

“What?” His eyes are watering and there’s this reedy, thin neediness in his tone that he hates. Hates all of it: the room, the morning, the smell of the coffee, the direct gaze of the stranger. He wants to go home. 

Dean seems to debate with himself for a short moment before settling on what must be the un-sugar-coated version. “It’s bad, Sam. It’s not good. There isn’t anything salvageable from the apartment. The fire marshall already released a statement calling the fire a gas leak. You are presumed perished.” 

“Perished?” Sam's voice heightens, tight and painful. “They think I’m dead?” 

“Well, I didn’t want to phrase it like that but yes, everybody thinks that you died in the fire.” 

“But I didn’t die in the fire,” he asks like he’s checking. 

“Right. And we’re gonna go clear that up after breakfast.” Dean gives him a short pat on the thigh, a quick, familiar gesture that feels remarkable and out of place. 

Sam breathes to try and clear his head, eyes pounding. “And it wasn’t a gas leak.” 

“No, Sam. It wasn’t a gas leak.” 

“Who  _ are _ you?” he asks again, different tones and emphasises. 

“I’m a hunter.” Dean moves on from the relatively quick work of the left hand to the much worse right. Sam lets him, hisses the pain out under his breath. “I hunt things.” 

“What kinds of things?” Sam’s eyes skip around the books on the floors, the etchings of demonic faces peering up from the open, wrinkled pages. 

Dean’s hands still. “Bad kinds of things.” 

The picture begins to come into focus. “Do you know what killed her?” 

“No, I don’t know what killed her,” Dean says too quickly, too evasively. 

“But you’re hunting it. You’re trying to kill it.” 

Dean doesn’t look up from what he is doing. 

Like a kaleidoscope. A different image from a different angle, new layers of colors and dimensions to get lost in while looking through the exact same peephole. The world on the other side of the door is larger and more horrifying than Sam had ever dared to fear. 

This is real. 

The books on the floor with the pressed herbs and the bullets scattered around his toes. The burns on his hands. The fact that Jessica is never, ever coming back. 

If horror is an ocean then fury is a wildfire. It smokes to life with a lightning strike in the center of Sam’s chest and burns through the rest of his body in a roar that fills his head and his ears and his nose and his frantic, stabbing heart. Nothing else outside of the noise of it matters. 

Sam knows what he gets to keep. 

-

Dean knew Sam was quick, wasn’t expecting him not to figure it out. He busies himself with the dirty work, doesn’t look up from the trembling wreckage of Sam’s hands but imagines he can hear the little abacus in Sam’s brain ticking away. Calculations, conclusions. 

He wonders what would have happened if he’d sat down at that diner table four years ago. If he’d said, “My name is Dean Winchester and your name is Sam Winchester.” Where would they be right now? If it weren’t so not-funny Dean would have to laugh - his father always thought they were protecting Sam by keeping their distance but Dean really doubts he saw this one coming from his vulture perch. 

Sam twists out his wrists, curls Dean’s hands into his own and squeezes even though it makes the blood flow faster. Dean can’t tear his eyes away. The last time they held hands Dean could almost close his whole fist over Sammy’s. 

“Take me with you,” his brother says. 

Dean looks up. 

Sam’s eyes are flayed open, completely serious in their intention and tone. Dean feels like he can see his soul from here, a frigid thing. “I want to kill it.”

“I can’t take you with me,” he says so fast it feels like a reflex. 

“You can,” Sam insists with grit. 

“Well, I’m not gonna,” Dean snorts back. “You’re a civilian, you’d just be a liability.” 

“Then I’ll do it myself.” Simple, immediate, defiant. 

Dean cannot believe he’s been in a room with Sam for less than fifteen minutes and they’re arguing. “You’re not gonna do it yourself!” 

“Watch me!” Sam gets angry in his shoulders first, yanks back and makes like he’s going to stand up before Dean snatches his elbow. 

“Sam!” He’s never heard this tone out of his own mouth before, admonishing and forceful. “Damnit, are you always such a pain in the ass? You’ve had a really rough couple of hours and I think you just need to take some time - ” 

“Dean.” 

It’s the first time he’s heard his name out of Sam’s mouth in eighteen years. 

Sam. With his full ride to Stanford. Sam with his rent payments and utility bills, Sam with his whole future in front of him that doesn’t have to end bloody and miserable the way that Dean’s does. Sam with that look on his face like he’s not taking ‘no’ for an answer. 

There’s a line at the tip of his tongue, the sentence that has weighed heavily on his lower jaw since he was eight. 

Sam, there’s something you don’t know. 

But it’s not going to give him back the person that was taken from him. 

This is Sam, now. 

Shaking with pain and radiating a growing, glowing fury now that he knows the thing that stole his life can be killed. He breathes like a furnace, fueling it hotter and brighter from the inside. 

Sam would be just as vulnerable and defenseless to the unnatural elements of this world if Dean leaves him as when their father left him eighteen years ago. 

“I need to help,” Sam pleads. “Just give me a - a year. One year to teach me everything you know and then you’ll never hear from me again.”

Panic is a stuttering heartbeat. “You don’t actually want that, Sam.” 

Sam leans in, closer than he’s been in years and years and years, and Dean would do anything to wind back the clock twenty four hours and give Sam his entire big, bright, shiny future back. 

“I want to kill that thing more than I have ever wanted anything in my entire life.” 

He doesn’t know why but he wasn’t expecting Sam to remind him so much of John. 

Sam’s twenty two now, isn’t he? Older than John was when he joined the Marines. As old as Dean was when he set off on his own. 

It isn’t selfish if he’s keeping Sam safe, if he’s teaching him all of the things that could have protected him. 

It’s only selfish if Dean makes it about himself. 

“It’s not an easy way to live,” he warns; one last, small protest. 

Sam deflates, loosening out like the engine’s been cut and the hydraulics are settling. “Thank you,” he says, because Dean’s tone is so weak he’s already taken it as a ‘yes’ and ran with it and Dean snorts. 

“Don’t thank me.” 

Sam’s throat clicks when he swallows and the relief must have knocked something loose underneath the bullheadedness because Dean catches the hard, glossy edge of Sam’s lost look. Eyes welling with tears Sam apologizes, sniffs and swipes his nose against his bicep. “Sorry, I - .” Fat, hot drips spilling over his cheekbones, he scrubs harder at his face and his eyelashes clump together. “I didn’t even say goodbye when I left.”

Dean feels for him. He really does. 

-

It’s not really lying, Dean justifies. It is the absence of forthcomingness. 

Sam has had a bunch of brothers that have never meant anything to him. It’s not going to make Dean special. It’s not going to mean the same thing to Sam. It’s just going to hurt both of them. 

What would it matter? What would it change? Hasn’t Sam been through enough in the last forty eight hours? 

Would he still want to stay if he knew?

Sam is stubborn and independent, won’t let Dean touch or help him with anything once his hands stop bleeding, once he’s got his mind set to something. He says, “ _ No _ . Thank you,” to the bagels Dean’s brought with him and insists that they need to get moving  _ now.  _

Dean doesn't have the heart to tell him that he already knows the rest of the story here in Palo Alto. There is nothing salvageable from the scene. There are no witnesses. There is no trail. 

He can see the way that Sam holds his hands up in the air over the showerhead in the reflection of the mirror while he picks up the room. Sam just sits in there with his head ducked up underneath the weak spray to cover the sounds of his sobs. Dean pulls his duffle bag back together, makes himself feel useful by leaving a set of socks and boxers and jeans and shirts and then making himself scarce checking out at the front desk and packing up the car. 

When Sam emerges his hair is wet and limp, sitting on his forehead and hiding his brow under the hood of a grey sweatshirt that Dean huddles in when he needs to sleep cold nights in the back of the car. Dean pops the door from the inside so Sam won’t have to pry his hands from where they’re stuffed deep into the pouch of the hoodie. He’s looking around the cab by the time Dean pulls out of the lot, gets them on the road pointed east.

Dean detailed the interior three weeks before and has only eaten, like, a quarter of his meals in the front seat since. He even made it back out last night to wipe up the blood and crack the windows to help air out the burnt hair smell. 

The back of the car is pretty well pristine, just a bag that Dean’s tossed back there to be able to grab his mouthwash and clean boxers with ease. There have been times where Dean’s entire world was cramped in between those two windows. Bedroom, playroom, living room - where he would read comic books, listen to his Walkman, and wonder what Sam was doing.

The leather seat is warm and well conditioned, soft to the touch and clean in every corner. 

“Sorry.” Sam ducks back to the road in front of them when he notices Dean watching him get stuck staring intently into the back seat, expression on his face like he’s got a question. He settles back into the sweater like a shiver, shuddering down into the corner of the seat and pointedly keeping his eyes to himself. 

Dean would saw off his left hand with his car keys right now if it meant he knew what Sam was thinking. 

Sam slumps into the slide of the bench seating more and more as they cover miles deeper into the contiguous forty-eight. Bundles into Dean’s sweatshirts and presses against the door of the passenger’s side of the vehicle, at the farthest point from Dean that he can get to. His face is fallen, morose and exhausted with sunken pits underneath his eyes and a paleness that makes his skin look waxy and unreal. 

He’s a heavy weight that breathes in troubled circuits. Dean listens to the soft sound of his exhausted, dreamless sleep well into the afternoon. 

Sam sleeps through the scenic views as they cut through Tahoe National Forest the short way, towards Reno. He sleeps through the roll of thunder clouds chasing them across the pink skyline and then through the spattering of rain on the glass windshield. They’re crossing the border into Nevada under the heavy blanket of a pitch black when Sam slips back around to the waking world on a stiff inhale, a groan and a gag punched together. Trees around them and above them, there is no sky overhead. 

Sam’s tired eyes stay looking out the windshield into the streaming blackness, faraway in the behind place and not focusing on anything in particular. Lost in the battering raindrops.

Dean drums his fingers along the arc of the steering wheel, tries to conjure up something important enough to bring up. 

After a few more dragged out miles and silent minutes Dean’s prepared to admit to himself that he doesn’t have anything good for this and punches on the radio. 

_ Ba- Ba- Ba- Ba- Barbara Ann.  _

_ Ba- Ba- Ba- Ba- Barbara Ann.  _

_ Barbara Ann! Take my hand! Barbara Ann!  _

_ You got me rocking and a’ rollin’, rockin’ and a’ reelin’ Barbara Ann!  _

“Y’know,” Dean clears his throat, just needs something to say after a string of silent hours because his tongue is going stale in his mouth and  _ Barbara Ann _ is hardly the emotional tuning fork he was banking on. “The Beach Boys recorded this song in one take.”

Sam lifts his eyes off the nowhere space in front of him. 

“Yeah,” Dean nods to himself, emboldened. “You can even hear ‘em laughing and fucking around in the background before the bridge.” 

Sam tunes into the music and Dean twists the volume up so that he can hear clearer - the whispered chuckles behind the harmonies, the broken laughter cracking into the lyrics. 

“The Beatles,” Sam rasps and Dean can’t turn the volume back down fast enough. “ _ Hey Jude _ . You can hear McCartney shout ‘Fucking hell.’” 

“The song  _ Louie, Louie - _ The Kingsmen,” Dean keeps it going, rattles off the top of his head. “The FBI investigated the lyrics because the recording was so slurred, thought it might be too obscene to air.” 

A polite phantom at one corner of Sam’s mouth, a twitch. “The recording of  _ I Put A Spell On You -  _ not CCR; Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Originally banned from radios for sounding ‘too cannibalistic.’”

Dean laughs, not too loud. He didn’t know that. “Where’d you learn so much about music?” 

Sam shrugs, a sluggish movement that has him bumping up and down against the door. “Went through a phase when I was a kid.”

The road in front of them is long and straight and flat, Dean barely has to keep his eyes on it laid out in the headlights in front of them. Gives him more time to glance at Sam, see the way he wriggles his lanky body, massages a hand into the invisible ache under his ribs.

Sam catches his look, pulls the hood of the sweatshirt down lower.

“So, what’s your story, man?” Dean asks, is even proud of himself for how steady his voice comes out. 

“Used to be pre-law.” Sam’s eyes are back out the window. 

“But before that.” 

Sam sucks in a breath, sharp and irritable as he rolls a look back across the bench seat right at Dean. 

Dean compulsively checks his collar in the rear view mirror.

“What?” He lifts his voice up, falsely casual. “Can’t I ask questions? ‘Cause I gotta tell you - this?” He spirals a gesture around the inside of the Impala “This is as big as this car gets. And the drive only gets longer.” 

“There’s nothing left.” Sam clears his throat. “Jessica and… our apartment. It was all I had.”

An invisible fist squeezes around the sore spot in the center of his chest. “Family?” he asks, can’t help himself. 

Sam shakes his head and slouches deeper into the corner. “Foster kid.” 

Dean knows, wants more. “Nobody you want to write?” 

A scoff pointed toward the glass. “I lived in thirteen homes in fifteen years. They were basically boarding houses for children.”

Dean knows. Wants more. “Still…” 

Sam shifts and settles himself more comfortably, sitting up. Something pops when he yawns widely; jaw to the left, jaw to the right, cracks his neck and rolls out his shoulders. Time on the clock is 1:23am. “What about you? You hunt monsters.” 

Dean breathes out through his nose, the opposite of the snort Sam made a moment ago. “Isn’t exactly a glamorous lifestyle.” 

“How’d you get into it?” 

“Uh…” Dean sucks on his teeth for a considering moment. “My mom. She died when I was a kid. Was killed. The same way that your – that Jessica was.”

Something that was rigid and inaccessible in Sam eases slightly, a weight and a wariness smoothing out into an empathy and aching. “I’m sorry,” he says, no real idea of how sorry he should be. 

Dean shrugs, a compulsion and a disguise, something to smother out the sharpness that is getting caught sideways in his throat. “I was real small. My dad was the one who started putting two and two together. Dragged me across the whole damn country trying to find and kill the thing. Just found a bunch of other ‘things’ to kill along the way.” 

He doesn’t look at Sam, too afraid of what might be showing in his own face. 

“Where is he now?” Sam asks softly. Probably expecting to hear another sad story. 

“Don’t know.” Dean lies. Again. “Not dead. Son of a bitch is too stubborn to die.” 

Dean has a spot marked on his maps for any time he catches a word on the wind about his father - a coven of witches John burns inside of a locked church outside of Eminence, Missouri, a werewolf he gores with a hunting knife after tracking the creature as it selected victims off a stretch of highway in British Columbia. There isn’t much, and there’s been even less than usual over the last six months as no one has been able to give Dean a last known whereabouts, but he knows that right now, at this exact second, John Winchester is On The Case. At least, according to the string of increasingly agitated voicemails crowding up Dean’s inbox, the ones where he demands, “Where is my son, Dean?”

Dean deletes them as soon as he listens through. Can’t imagine what son he’s talking about. 

Sam must smell the bad blood on the air and has enough sense to not ask any more questions about his (their) father. 

“Where are we headed?” He changes the subject. 

“Well, first thing’s first - gotta get you some new duds. Means we gotta get some money.” Dean scratches at his chin, laying out what he’s been turning over in his mind while Sam was snoozing. “Then you’re gonna learn how to hold a gun. Then you’re gonna learn how to fight.”

“I know how to fight,” Sam grumbles, but says nothing on the gun. 

“And then,” Dean grins across the seat. “I’m gonna teach you how to kill something.” 

Sam’s jaw squares off and his eyes get hard. “We’re gonna kill the monster.” 

“We’re gonna kill  _ a  _ monster,” Dean corrects. “Baby steps, Sammy.” 

“Don’t call me Sammy.”

“Check this out,” Dean says and - instead of acknowledging the protest - wheels a folded newspaper over to the other side of the car. “Page three. There’s a flashlight in the glovebox.”

Sam struggles to get the spread open and the pen light on, glaring Dean away when he even breathes in a helping direction. He flips through to locate what Dean marked down as interesting nearly a full week ago when he was just swinging by Palo Alto, before he’d heard Sam’s screaming from the street or seen the smoke billowing from his bedroom window. 

“Horror in Homer?” Sam finds in the upper right hand corner. “Is that where we’re going?” 

“Georgia,” Dean confirms. 

“Trespassers found dead in historical manor,” Sam reads aloud. “Local community grieves in the wake of tragedy surrounding the untimely passing of Patricia Modeen, Nathaniel Boores, and Katherine Miller, all 15. Police decline to comment on circumstances surrounding the deaths of the three Homer High School attendees other than to press that the cause of death was accidental and that the teens were on the grounds of the historic Dernworth Manor illegally at the time. The manor and gift shop will remain closed to visitors through to November tenth.”

“You ever seen a ghost, Sam?”

-

Mourning is an endless list of regrets. 

It’s impossible to account for every single one - any time Sam puts his mind to thinking about Jessica there’s a new moment where he wishes he’d held her closer, laid in bed longer. 

He wants to tell her that he loves her. He wants to tell her that she was the most astoundingly normal thing that has ever happened to him, and he means that as the most deeply affectionate compliment that he can imagine. He wants to tell her that he’s going to kill it. 

With nothing else to do with the gaping hole in his chest Sam stuffs it full of loose papers and new knowledge. He puts his hands on the books and binders and journals again and doesn’t let go. It’s easier to compartmentalize when there’s nothing left. Sam Wesson is dead. 

The distance between one border of Nevada and the next is a mechanical slideshow. Every time Sam looks up from the words in his lap it’s a different time of day, a different style of scenery. It’s mid morning in the desert, high noon in a dry shrub, late afternoon next to a highway town baked tan in the sun. 

He thinks about what it means to be alone whenever his mind slips away on a lull. Completely tetherless, without possessions or ties. There isn’t even the great state of New York to keep him anchored down anymore. Sam is boundless in every single direction including down. 

It’s almost already like he never existed at all. 

And Dean Winchester is there. 

Needling into the side of Sam’s focus with a lightning strike of a smile and joke kept at the edge of his teeth at all times, like this is all just so funny to him. He’s there with that drugstore body wash and burnt sugar salt smell and this endless,  _ endless  _ soundtrack of radio stations and local broadcast sermons, midday traffic reports and pop culture news. He chews with his mouth open and drums along to something he’s hearing in his head while Sam is trying to read. 

He asks Sam what movies he saw in theaters in the late 90s instead of asking Sam how he’s feeling, which means more to Sam than any of that other stuff. 

Dean explains that the drive to Georgia is just under five days if they’re hauling ass, he’s got just enough money to get them through to Wyoming if they eat nothing but gas station taquitos and sleep in the car, but they’re going to have to pull together at least another two hundred dollars to make it the rest of the way, so he’s not particularly inclined to haul ass. 

“Like - a minimum, two hundred. No laundry.”

It begins to dawn on Sam that the road to vengeance is littered with potholes. “What do you do for cash?” he asks when he should be asking ‘what do  _ we  _ do for cash.’ 

“A little of this, a little of that,” Dean shrugs as he leans against the side of the car next to a gas pump in Carlin. Sam has the passenger side door popped open to let the dry air cut through the car from one side to the other, legs stretched out. He’s never been to Nevada before. “A sprinkle of credit card fraud.” 

Sam snorts and shakes his head. He thought he’d left his criminal masterminding behind when he turned fifteen. “I can drive. We can rotate, sleep in shifts.” 

Dean laughs - at him, with him, Sam looks him up and down with swollen eyes. “You’re not driving my car. I’m the only one who drives my car.” 

Gives Sam more time to read, anyway. 

He consumes as they eat up miles. All of the books that he’d already torn out of Dean’s bags and the journal with the scratchy illustrations and the rambling, rabbling analysis. The thing reads like an unedited field guide, all cold analytical spirals in a dense scrawl of barely legible handwriting. The stream of consciousness of a one-track mind. He thinks it must be the product of his new companion before he hits a small cluster of words on an early page - the only piece that doesn’t appear to be on the explicit topic of exploring and dismantling the paranormal:

_May 2, 1987_ _  
__Mother Mary, full of grace, please forgive me for what I have done to your sons. Dean won’t even look at me._

Sam touches the page. The father, he remembers. The one that isn’t dead but is very clearly estranged. 

He puts it together from context clues that Dean has been on his own for a while. He’s got this kind of unchecked confidence, like no one ever taught him how to be uncomfortable around strangers. 

He needs something to do with his hands at all times, fidgeting with the radio knobs or folding over pizza slices. He keeps trying to help Sam with jacket zippers and book pages before Sam snarls him back. His canine teeth are too sharp when he smiles. 

It’s easiest to see when he’s got something to spark off of, sitting next to someone at a diner counter, insisting that they sit down to eat even though Sam is dying to make any of the moments in the last week of his life mean anything. He chats up waitresses and bartenders and gas station attendants. “Hey, good mornin’, how are ya?” Stares them right down between the eyes and commands their focus.

Sam has always preferred to slink through the backgrounds, duck his shoulders and his head. Dean grabs their attention and Sam grabs a handful of protein bars. 

They gnaw them over as the scenery smears in colors and lights all around. 

Dean asks him what his favorite cereal is. 

Sam hasn’t had cereal in years. 

He reads about poltergeists and black dogs, witches and werelings and women in white. Sam learns about consecrated iron and holy water - rock salt and brick dust. He rehearses latin chants on the silent tip of his tongue. 

And then they are somewhere - some town, some bar, some back road that Sam has never heard of before and it reminds Sam all over again how much larger the world is than he knew. 

“I don’t want a drink, man.” Sam peers out of the window to see the neon piping of the bar’s sign -  _ Tooley’s Tavern.  _ It glows, pink and ominous against a black sky over their heads. He doesn’t know what state they’re in, just that it’s colder than it was and he’s never been here before.

He feels smaller than he ever has before in his life, smaller than when he used to crawl underneath beds and dream about the vastness and potential of the universe. Actually being out in the endlessness of it is like staring into the face of an old god, something ancient and alive that has always moved through the shadows just outside the touches of firelight. 

And Dean is there. 

Shoving on Sam’s shoulder because he must need something to do with his hands again. Needling him back into the moment with, “Then nurse a beer and keep me outta trouble. You can read inside.” 

The bar is a sawdust on the floor type of place. The number of motorcycles stacked up outside should have clued him in to what patronage to expect and how many, but Sam isn’t fully prepared for the bustling crowd of burly biker types or the way that Dean smiles and greets his way to the bar itself, makes himself known and slips in anywhere that he can that he’s looking to play a game of pool with whoever has some money to throw around. 

Sam’s out of place. He’s the youngest person in the room by whatever margin bridges him and Dean, and then at least twice that to the next person. There’s a few women, some leathered up and wearing denim and some with cropped shirts and short skirts, but their attentions maneuver right past Sam and stay stuck on Dean. Everyone’s does. 

The bartender gives Sam a shrewd once-over but doesn’t ask him any questions when he orders whatever is on the tap closest to him. There’s a table in the back, under some scaffolding with shit lighting and a terrible view of the kitchen door and that’s where he plants himself, far away from the spotlight. 

Sam keeps an eye open over the top page of the journal - reads an entry on changelings and stolen children, replaced by enchanted carvings and bundles of twigs. Dean winks at him when he catches Sam’s eye. 

It’s easy to imagine that Dean has killed something. 

He melts into the role - plays up being bawdy and talking shit, makes the men snorting and shuffling around the edges of the hanging lamplight  _ want  _ to beat him, no matter how much it costs them to buy in. 

He dismantles the pool table like a surgeon, laughs and swings his beer around so the boys feel like they’re getting a show for their asskicking as well. There’s no hard feelings when he loops his arm around the neck of a man a half a head taller than him who’s down forty five dollars. He keeps glancing up and over to Sam’s corner of the world, where no one is paying him much mind or attention. To make sure he’s still there or still watching, Sam doesn’t know. 

It’s well into the morning when Dean bids them each farewell with a fist full of twenty dollar bills, has all of their names and nicknames. They laugh at his punchy jokes goodnight and Sam hasn’t finished his beer and has barely read anything else about Celtic folklore. 

“One forty two, one forty seven,” Dean counts off as he shuffles the cash around in his hands. Sam hasn’t said a word aloud in hours and Dean doesn’t make him. “One eighty two. That’s motel room money, Sammy.” 

“Sam.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says but Sam doesn’t believe him. 

There are no streetlights in this stretch of wherever, just the dense empty space of 2:48am. By the time that Sam’s back hits a bed he doesn’t know if he’s tired or not. 

There’s something that’s turning over in his head, behind the fire and underneath it. 

He stares up at the popcorn ceiling and listens to a distant stream of overnight trucks passing on the freeway. It’s easy to imagine that the time on his own hadn’t been good for this man, this particular man. He feeds on the acknowledgement of others, needs it more than food or drink or rest apparently. 

That must be it, Sam thinks. The reason why Dean was so quick to take on some snot-nosed Stanford kid. 

Dean Winchester must be lonely. 

Sam could have been anybody and he just happened to be Sam. 

“Hey, Sam,” Dean calls out as he lays on his back in the dark, a bed away from Sam and tossing around like a full day of driving and a full night of drinking hasn’t done anything to dampen down his energy. “Who’s your favorite Spice Girl?”

“Go to sleep, Dean.”

-

Dean’s very first hunt was a ghost, too. Fourteen years old and finally graduated from waiting by the phone, which in of itself was a welcome graduation from staring blankly back and forth at Pastor Jim for long weekends. 

His father had given him a cuff over the head before they walked into the house, sunk down to Dean’s level to make stern eye contact and said, “You gotta keep  _ smart _ in there, Dean. You stay behind me, you watch my signals.” 

Dean’s gaze flicked between his father and the shambling home pitched up behind him, something groaning and swaying like a wheezing drag for air from inside. 

“Hey.” John gave him a firm shake, expression deadly serious. “Are you here, Dean?”

Dean wasn’t there. 

He was always here.

As far as Dean can tell Sam was born without that essential self centeredness that makes people question “Why me?” when tragedies occur. He’s vaulted right over ‘denial’ and plowed straight into ‘anger’ with all the energy and dedication he possesses. He reads nineteen of the twenty four hours in a regular day, starts rereading when Dean runs out of any fresh material for him to burn through. He looks up from the tomes to ask questions and turn down food. It keeps him busy, keeps him feeling like he’s working on the problem, Dean can tell. 

It’s those last five hours, though. 

Sam twitches when he dreams, the snare of his lip jumping like he’s snarling at something in some other world because he doesn’t know how small and pink and vulnerable he is compared to the actual, real nightmares. The way that puppies sleep once they’ve been separated from their mothers, twitchy and growly. Furrowing brows and unsettled, panting breaths, Dean doesn’t know whether to wake him up and spare him whatever is going on behind his eyes or let him have whatever sleep he can manage. He keeps the radio low in case any words come warbling out. 

Dean splits off the main interstate and then splits off again, and again, branching away from the well worn paths off into the remoteness. The shadows of billboards for local churches pass over Sam’s curled up shoulders. 

He wakes Sam up with a spit-wet finger in the ear on the side of a windy pasture in rural Tennessee. The land hasn’t been put to use in years if the state of the fencing is anything to go by when he drags Sam between dark wet-rot posts. 

He’s been teaching Sam pretty much the same way that he was taught, just in two weeks instead of over a decade. He puts a line of bottles off in the distance and tells him that they’ll be out there until every one of them is in pieces. 

Sam does not manage his frustrations well. 

He tries to, mind you. He takes some big deep breaths and refuses to look Dean head on in case something in his petulant expression betrays how agitated not being an instant marksman makes him.

“It’s kinda hard to concentrate,” he finally admits from between grinding teeth, not specifying the ripping wind or the raw burns or Dean’s persistent gaze over him as the cause. 

“Imagine how hard it’s gonna be to concentrate when something’s chewing on you.” Dean reclines with a beer, leather collar turned up against the breeze and observes how Sam holds himself. “Besides, there’s not gonna be a real need for sharpshooting in Homer. If you can point a shotgun straight you got a good chance of making it out alive.” 

He tosses a casing in Sam's direction and he catches it on reflex. 

“Rock salt,” he elaborates. “And iron knuckles. For self defense. Not that you’d want to get close enough to use them. I’ve got EMF readers, recording equipment, electronic thermometers, all sorts of nerd stuff to play around with.”

“We kill it by burning the body,” Sam recites like he’s reading it straight from the journal he’s been pouring over like scripture. 

“Malevolent spirits need something physical to tether themselves,” Dean affirms. “The manor house we’re heading to is actually a historical reconstruction owned by the county and run as a museum. The original place was burned to the ground in the early 1800s, all Dernworths included.”

“So there are no bodies to burn,” Sam connects.

“Except,” Dean feels himself grinning, thrilled with being able to tell Sam things he doesn’t already know. “For a locket with a knot of Elouise Dernworth’s hair.” 

“You’re dragging me to Georgia to break into a house and burn a piece of jewelry?” Sam’s face is blank, underwhelmed. 

“Every hunt is important, Sammy.” Dean drags on his beer and a few moments elapse before he recognizes the phrase aloud from all those dissatisfying times that his father said it to him as a child. 

“My name,” his brother levels a shot and the bottle on the highest fencepost shatters, “is Sam.”

-

One motel room smells like industrial solvents and the next one smells like mothballs. The mattresses are too soft and the sheets are scratchy. Sam wakes up in the morning facing in, away from the sunlight bleeding in around the edges of the curtains that never seem to close all the way and the first thing that he sees every single day is Dean’s face. 

He figures that Dean must favor sleeping on his left side, then. Sam intentionally maneuvers himself to the left side when they bed down again in Chattanooga. 

Sam wakes up and the first thing that he sees is Dean’s face, sleeping on his right side.

It’s not always when he thinks that Sam isn’t looking, he’s pretty unabashed about staring when Sam is looking right back, but it doesn’t stop startling Sam when he folds down a corner of a newspaper or glances up from the journal and Dean’s eyes are already there.

Sometimes, when Sam doesn’t look away, he asks, “What are you thinking about over there, Sammy?” 

Sam is usually thinking about the way that Jessica’s hair smelled that morning or the pit in his stomach when he looks over his shoulder into the back seat or the sound his nose made underneath Mr. Petrov’s fist eight years ago.

Twelve days after everything changes forever Sam unwinds the bandages from his hands and replaces them with a set of standard flesh colored band-aids to cover the scabs. The beginnings of the scars aren’t as bad as they could be. All of Dean’s clucking and poking and, “Does that hurt?”s culminate in a raw, pink skin that doesn’t even rise from the texture of the rest of his wrist. The healing happens without his participation and the worst of the pain ebbs away from the edges. When he rubs the pad of his thumb against his ring finger he can’t tell which one doesn’t have a fingerprint. 

It’s nearly precisely five minutes from the first time that Dean sees Sam flex and clench his fist without wincing that he’s shoving on Sam’s shoulder again and demanding, “Show me your moves.” 

“Stop it,” Sam swats him away. There’s nowhere else to go in the cab of the car. 

“C’mon, you look like you’ve never had your ass kicked, college boy,” Dean says and Sam still can’t quite tell if Dean is laughing with him or at him, can’t really imagine what could be so funny at all. He sizes Sam up, like he can see all the parts and pieces and how they fit together without even dismantling the engine and Sam ruffles. 

“I’ve had my ass kicked before,” he snips. And then adds, for himself, “One time.” 

“Oh, I’m  _ so  _ scared,” Dean mocks and Sam can feel his face flush hot. “Today’s gonna be two times, c’mon.”

So here Sam is, with Dean, in another nowhere place in another nowhere town, not a single tangible step closer to getting Sam’s fist around the throat of the reason why he’s even here at all.

Dean’s got a real knack for finding places like this - the sites off the sides of the map that suit his needs. Little hidey holes in the side roads, spots that don’t really belong to anyone. Dean Winchester asks and the universe produces. Sam wonders if he’s been to this dry riverbank before, with the loose, flakey mud that fizzes up a fine dust layer as they pad around in wary circles. 

“Okay,” Dean says and sets himself up broadly, stripped down to just a white undershirt and a comfortably fitting pair of jeans. “The first thing that you’re gonna wanna do is - ” 

He’s got both of his arms raised up, gesturing down to the alignment of his feet to his hips and Sam helps himself to the opening - ducks his own shoulder up into the negative space of Dean’s and takes control of his torso. 

He wheels Dean’s body off to the side of the clearing with mass and inertia, laughs when Dean splutters and stumbles with a shocked look on his face. 

It’s the first time he’s laughed since Jess died. 

The thought is enough to keep him distracted through Dean plowing back into his personal space, running straight through Sam the same way he did nearly two weeks ago in the apartment. Sam is uprooted at the waist and hits the baked dirt with a wheeze, Dean’s weight crashing down on top of him and pushing all of the air out.

His hands still sting so he’s all elbows, keeps his chest up above Dean’s head and drives back down into his shoulder at the same time Dean tries to surface, underestimating how much control Sam was going to be able to hold onto. He lays into Sam’s side, slamming the heel of his palm against the tender part underneath his ribs with a numbing force. Sam shouts out and gets a good foot underneath himself, tips the whole mess to the side and dumps Dean off, rolls so  _ he’s  _ on top now, sitting heavily on Dean’s stomach. 

He grapples for hold, gets tangled up in a deflecting knot of fists and fingers as Dean beats him back. 

“Fucker,” Dean grits and Sam grins down at him, making sure to get as much dirt as he can into Dean’s hair before Dean gets his fists and his wits back together. He’s stronger than Sam, that’s not a question. 

Sam is rolling up and back onto his feet before Dean can knock him back down again, keeps it light and waits while Dean finds his footing. 

The sunlight warms against his skin on what is an otherwise brisk day, keeps him comfortable in the set he’s borrowing - a henley Dean tossed at him and the same jeans that cuff up overtop the notches of his ankles. He can feel his heartbeat pounding against the ivory cage of his ribs, a powerful, pumping force that sings into the stiff scaffolding of his muscles. 

The stretch and the flex remind him that he’s strong and alive, still here despite everything. When he breathes in the fresh air it's until his lungs bottom out. 

They stance up in parallels, opposites and matches. Dean dances forward a step, kicks up the dust and tests the edges of Sam’s reflexes. He’s got a look on his face, out of breath and surprised and it makes Sam feel vindicated in a dirty, petty way. 

Not laughing now.

“Who taught you how to fight? Strawberry Shortcake?” Dean bounces on the balls of his feet and feints left and then right again just to see Sam jump. 

Sam doesn’t rise to the bait. He keeps his distance, keeps his eyes on Dean’s hands, his shoulders, his eyes. 

Dean pushes him with a forward kick that Sam blocks away, follows it up with two tightly grouped hits aimed towards his center that Sam absorbs with the shield of his forearms before he can volley back. 

The contact is looser than Sam knows he’s capable of, open palmmed and not packing any real sting except for Sam’s pride when Dean feints him out, connects with Sam’s stomach hard enough to punch out a noise with a crow of laughter. 

He grinds his teeth and ducks up underneath the next swings, twists up into the opening and back into the soft undermeat of Dean’s arm that he claimed earlier, only Dean is expecting him this time, probably left the door open as an invitation and traps Sam next to his torso with the brute strength of his arms. Tension bands in around his chest, his biceps, and Dean is a scalding, stifling cage in all directions. The stubble on his chin grates against the thin skin over Sam’s pulse.

Clawing his way back out, Sam’s not afraid to use his sharp corners in soft spots as he struggles and stumbles, breaking the grip. The momentum’s all off, has him retreating backwards on a wobbly, weak-kneed crouch. He scrambles to get back up on his feet but Dean blocks out any opening with his presence and his booming laughter, won’t knock him all the way down to the ground, won’t let him stand back up. There’s dust in Sam’s face, up his nose and in his mouth. He sneezes on his back, shakes the dirt from his hair. 

He kicks out - hard - takes Dean down from the ankle and he lands on his stomach with a gasping, groaning laugh. 

Scraping himself back together as quickly as possible, Sam is on his knees with his fists up and his heart pounding - expecting retaliation but Dean just languishes on the beach, cackling as he rolls onto his back. “Who was the guy that kicked your ass? Holy shit.” 

Some bird deep in the browning autumn underbrush next to the dried out river twitters a light song but then, afterwards, once Dean’s done laughing too, it’s quiet all around. Sam’s pulse is slow to calm down so he sits back down with a puff of dust.

The soreness around the sinkhole in his chest comes back to aching as he catches his breath. 

Dean stretches himself out in the sunlight like a cat and sighs, a twitching rhythm in his throat the only lingering sign he’d just been trying to kick Sam in the chest just a moment ago. With his eyes closed Sam looks him over, not for the first time. 

Dean Winchester has a face like a renaissance sculpture and the type of jaw they try to sell you in cigarette ads, something that was carved with artistry and intention to cover up cancer. Out here in the sunlight his hair is more gold than the brown it seems in the car past 8:00pm. There’s a scar, long and thin and pale along the line of his collar bone that’s poking out from the edge of his newly dirty t-shirt.

Sam tries to imagine what else he would be doing if he weren’t here right now.

Here. A dried up riverbank in a state he’s never been to in a county he’s never heard of, sweaty from fighting a man he’d never seen before two weeks ago. In the thicket, off the map, somewhere that no one owns so it can belong to them for the amount of time that they need it. 

A cubbyhole, a hiding spot. Nobody else in the entire world knows where he is right now. 

“What are you thinking about over there?” Dean doesn’t open his eyes to ask, angling his chin up to catch the full light of the sun. 

“You saved my life,” Sam says out loud for the first time. 

Dean comes up to his elbows, back to staring. Sam stares back. 

“I would have died in the fire if you hadn’t been there. I wouldn’t be here now.” 

“Yeah, no,” Dean pushes in, face pinching. “Don’t mention it, of course. It’s what I’m here for.” 

Sam hasn’t even actually said thank you. “I just mean, if you hadn’t been there -”

“I get it, Sam,” Dean cuts him off. His voice is sharp and Sam thinks this must be the first time he’s actually seen Dean uncomfortable, shifty as he draws himself up and in. “Let’s not make this a big deal.” 

“Yeah, thank you,” Sam assures, absolves him of the rest of the conversation by pulling back away from death and dying. “Sorry. It’s just weird. Two weeks ago we didn’t even know each other and now it’s like...” 

Dean’s staring at him again, but he’s not smiling anymore. 

Five more hours on the road, Dean plays  _ The Rolling Stones _ too loud to talk over and doesn’t smile again until he plasters something fake onto his face to go check into the motel in Homer, Georgia. 

Sam doesn’t understand what it was that he said. 

-

If anybody had told Abel Anderson yesterday that he would be trespassing on municipal property with five kids he barely knows he would have already assumed it had something to do with Sara Ingram. 

He’s a good kid - his mom tells him so. He’s never had detention. He’s even been asked to stay after class by a teacher. 

He makes his bed every morning and he’s always on time for the bus. He doesn’t raise his hand in class and he won’t chew gum until his braces get taken off in January. He eats the recommended amount of vegetables to balance every meal and carries his epipen religiously. Abel Anderson has a backup pencil case. 

“C’mon, Abe,” Sara Ingram had said to him in the school hallway, shoving his shoulder hard enough to knock him against his own locker. “Sneak out with us. We’re gonna spend the entire night in the manor!”

“I don’t know.” he’d hesitated, chewing over chapped lips. “What about those kids that died?”

“What are you, scared?” She laughed, white teeth under dark makeup.“You gotta come! It won’t be any fun without you!” 

No one has ever said that about Abel Anderson before. 

It’s six of them altogether - him and Sara, Byron Griffith, Margaret Ryan, Emmie McMurray, and Joshua Vollmecke. They giggle and hush one another in turns, rolling in the grass along the hills up to the brick sides of the building, Abel lagging a half step behind on anxious tiptoes. 

He’s the last one to cram through the loose window in the old kitchen, tripping down from the windowsill into the circle of giggling whispers as Sara explains that they’re going to be playing hide and seek, bald mischief in her grin. “And I nominate Abel ‘It!’”

If Abel is being honest he doesn’t understand Sara very much at all. She wears platform boots that make her several inches taller than him and must spend several minutes every morning penciling the thick rim of eyeliner around each eye. She has three piercings in each ear and one through her nose, a strip down the back of her hair dyed bright pink, and wears t-shirts for bands that Abel’s not allowed to listen to. 

They sit next to each other for sixth period Biology. She dissected the frog and he took the notes. 

The kitchen is larger and colder than before once they skitter in their separate directions behind Abel’s back. Standing in the center of the stagnation with his eyes closed feels ominous, a chilled powder on his skin, but he’s chalking it up to his first-time-breaking-and-entering-jitters. 

“Ready or not, here I come!” It’s a childish call on the air and he feels gawky shouting, eggshell voice cracking in his throat. 

He’s been to Dernworth Manor before - during actual daytime hours. Once when his father took him on an attempted bonding experience and then again on an ill-advised field trip in the fifth grade - one that spiraled quickly out of control when the gaggle of ten year olds caught on that an entire family of people burned to death on the exact floor they were standing on. 

He realizes he’s retained more than expected about the layout of the manor when he dives into the shadowed halls. The wallpaper in the corridor between the dining room and the study is a dark textured velvet and Abel runs his hand over the plushness as he trails deeper into the house. 

Another chill catches the flesh down the back of Abel’s neck and he shivers again, folding deeper into his mustard cardigan. He watches the brush of his fingers against the rich purple, pressing forward toward the frame of a doorway to a set of french doors, over the cold moonlight reflecting off pane glass windows. 

There is a woman standing behind him. 

Abel twists on the spot, heart leaping into his throat and fumbling for an excuse, any excuse for what he could possibly be doing in the house past 10:00pm on a Tuesday but when he looks, peering deep down the narrow stretch of the hall, she’s not there. 

“Guys?” he calls, voice rising into the emptiness. 

Margaret screams from the drawing room. 

They run in from all directions to where she is sobbing, jabbering, pointing at the windows off from the drawing room overlooking the seasonal courtyard. It’s a few stumbling, hysterical moments with Emmie gripping her shoulders and begging, “Maggie, what? What happened?” that she’s able to explain. 

“She didn’t have eyes, she was standing in the window!” 

The hair on the back of Abel’s neck stands on end. His heartbeat is a percussion in his temple. The other five seem to feel it too, a primal, mutual anxiety seeding into their brains. 

There hadn’t been a lot of information in the news about the kids that died in the conservatory a couple of weeks ago - just that they shouldn’t have been there in the first place and that the funerals would be closed casket. 

But. Kids talk. 

Not Abel, of course - he was a good kid up until about an hour ago, and good kids didn’t whisper scary stories. Especially not the ones about broken children being left in twisted heaps, no bone unshattered in their crumpled corpses. 

“I want to go.” Emmie’s voice is weak in the darkness. She looks to Sara. 

The hand that shoots out from the shroud of a shadow and clutches onto her shoulder is chalky white and skeletal. Abel sees the apparition in horrific detail, unmistakably real despite everything that Abel has ever heard about myths and legends not being able to hurt him. Ash flakes away from crunching knuckle joints onto Emmie’s pink sweatshirt and, from the feel of it alone, she is sprinting and screaming back down the hallways where they came from. 

Back in the kitchen the window doesn’t open up as easy from the inside and Emmie jams and jams the heel of her hand up against it, face red and cheeks wet. Joshua wedges his shoulder up into it but the paint cracks and nothing else. There’s more screaming, higher pitched and more horrified when Emmie finally sees the chalky handprint leftover on her shoulder. 

The door back out to the dining room is locked but the brass handle creaks and twists around slowly. Trapped, they scream and claw at the walls. 

Abel’s whole life flashes before his eyes. Being born, pitching a small rubber ball to himself alone in his bedroom, a tour guide pointing out the access panel to the root cellar of the Dernworth Manor during a field trip, accidentally eating ants picnicking with his mother in 2002, meeting Sara Ingram, waking up and getting ready for school this morning.

“The root cellar!” 

“What?” Sara spins around when Abel grabs her shoulder. 

He’s on his knees before anyone else can make any sense of the noises coming from the hallway or why the window won’t open, fingertips digging to find the seams of the hatch. The only way to go is down, like the rats in the science lab, the ones that were watching while they peeled the frog skin back one layer at a time weeks ago. They heave up the wooden slate door and scramble down the steep stairs, sealing it shut behind them. 

The darkness and the dirt are even colder. It is quieter under the earth. Joshua has a lighter in his pocket but extinguishes the flame when the wood flooring shifts and creaks over their heads. Emmie smothers a hand over her mouth, choking down the worst of the noise but she can’t swallow all the terror as the dragging, shifting steps get nearer. 

A heaving, gaining  _ thump, Thump, THUMP, T H U M P! _

They scream and cling, a six-headed animal panicking when the cellar door peels open from the outside, shrill and consuming in the darkness. 

The guy gives them a look like the very last thing he expected to see in the root cellar of a preserved historical manor was six shitty teenagers but, to be fair, the very last thing they expected to see was some skinny-wristed twentysomething with a sawed off shotgun. 

“Dean!” he shouts off into the distance of the halls. “There’s a bunch of kids in here!” 

“God dammit, there’s always a bunch of kids.” Another head pokes into the clear cut window into the upper floor, lit up from underneath the chin by flashlights like they’re all crowded around a campfire, telling the ghost story that’s playing out live. “Hey! What’s the matter with you?” he shouts down directly at them. “How is this fun?” 

Byron hiccups. 

“Dean, we gotta get them out of here,” the first guy with the dark hair and the put upon expression says, talking over the jittery kids below without acknowledging any of their eyes.

Relief telegraphs through their clutching hands and shaking shoulders. Adults, Abel thinks. Thank God.

“Yeah, yeah. We gotta split up - you’re on childcare. Get them up and out on the lawns, past the gates if you can manage. If anything moves - blast it. I’m gonna find the locket to burn.”

He nods and climbs down the stairs and he just gets taller the closer that he gets, makes Abel feel that much smaller in the hole in the ground.

“Sam.” The guy at the top of the stairs is still there, something soft and genuine behind his bravado. “Be careful.” 

‘Sam’ nods and keeps it together convincingly until the very second that Dean begins to turn away and panic strikes the guy in an authentic way, makes him sound young when he calls back, “Dean, wait!” 

Dean’s head is back, expression impatient. 

“My favorite Spice Girl is Sporty Spice.”

The grin that splits his face is completely out of place in the darkness, beaming and delighted. 

“Oh my god,” Sara sobs, finally broken. “We’re all gonna die.” 

When Elouise Dernworth comes again she is ghostly white, bleached out to the hollow core of where her eyes should be. The figure of her somehow still manages to suck light in rather than reflect it. Like a black hole in the shape of a woman. 

There’s nothing that could have prepared Abel to witness this. He has lived his life wrapped in small comforts and ruled by pedestrian routines. He’s never taken risks and pointedly avoided dark corners and yet here he is, staring something undead in the face, fearful and frozen. 

The college kid with his skinny wrist and the angry slant of his jaw levels the shot without hesitation, doesn’t blink at the surrealness of her existence when he pulls the trigger and Abel can tell that it’s not loaded with buckshot from the sound it makes when it pelts through the unnatural form and through to the other side. 

She dematerializes with a horrible wail echoed by the gaggle of awkward, clinging teenage limbs. The guy looks at the gun like he’s surprised that it worked. 

They crowd up underneath the spread of his arms like timid ducklings when he ushers them up the stairs, all in a line. His tone is harsh, unforgiving when they tremble and sob. No patience, no sympathy, he is the man that is going to get them to tomorrow. “Move!”

Abel reaches out with a trembling hand and hooks into Sara’s shoulder because he knows her shoes aren’t good for running. When she looks back at him, her eyeliner is smudged up and weeping down her cheeks. 

“Keep close,” the guy presses with a sour look on his face and a set-in kind of presence that makes Abel think he spends a lot of his time frowning with his brow drawn in. “Stay behind me.” 

The shadow of feminine silhouette passes through the pools of moonlight without a presence. The shape of her slithers, hissing. 

The man steps up to fill the space between her and his sudden charges with his shoulders and his gun. He pulls the trigger again and they all jump and scramble, Joshua sobs and clutches Byron and Emmie into his chest, but that thing - whatever she is - learned about pain. 

A shadow cuts down from the ceiling, dropped like an anvil through the front half of the gun in a slice. The metal muzzle tumbles down separately from the grip. White grains spill everywhere like a shattered hourglass. 

“Oh, shit!” 

Plan B appears to be ‘Run.’

Open doors shutter close in clatters all over the manor, raining from the rafters like applause. 

When they turn the corner Elouise Dernworth is already there waiting for them. 

She appears for the third time as her whole figure from the top of her head to the floating, scraping tips of her toes. Her hair is smoking and her head rolls over on the thin, crumbling stake of her neck. Hands like claws, she rushes them. 

This guy, this stranger who doesn’t know them and doesn’t really seem to like them, steps in front. With something clenched in his fist, he blocks his forearms in front of his face and shouts out. He bares down in blatant opposition to the wailing crush of the ghost of Dernworth Manor. 

She flares out at the spindly length of her fingers to smother over him and it’s only in that last moment - the bare instance before she bowls through them that she lights on fire. 

Elouise Dernworth disintegrates from the edges inward, flaking away in crusts of smoke. 

“Sam!” 

Seven of them sitting, stupid and sooty in the corridor.

“Sammy!” 

The other guy takes the corner like a matchbox racing car, skids out in the back and Abel can see that he’s had some sort of encounter himself; more disheveled and streaked with blood than when he left them. The color comes back to his face as soon as the other boy twists on his seat to see him, looking up from the ground and, by all accounts, in better shape. 

The guy - Dean - closes the distance, eyes all over like he’s looking for bumps or bruises but aside from the scrape they all seem to be in relatively one piece. 

“Sam,” he says for the third time, hand on his shoulder. “Are you alright?”

Sam seems to be feeling the same general way that the rest of them are, dazed and baffled - overwhelmed and out of depth. “That was - ” he sputters.“That was amazing!” 

All six of them look to him like he has two heads at once. 

One hand up on his forehead and the other gesturing around, like he can’t quite believe what just happened either, now that he’s started he can’t seem to stop and the crease of his brow is broken open into unfettered awe. Spluttering and gasping around the empty hallway, “That was a ghost! Did you see that? Did you - we just - we saved these kids! I - I - and  _ you. _ ” 

The older guy has a tenderness in his face under the gash of blood streaming from the edge of his hairline down his chin like war paint. Like a river rock, no sharp edges when he starts to gather the group of them together. “Come on, Melanie C. Let’s get these delinquents outta here.”

Abel looks down. Sara Ingram is holding his hand. 

-

There’s an abandoned structure outside of Hamburg, Iowa where a faceless figure looms in the windows. He appears to wrap a ghoulishly long hand around the throats of trespassers, but - here’s the thing - Dean couldn’t tell you where this fuckin’ guy came from. 

No history on the house outside a string of increasingly depressing exchanges with the bank before an uneventful foreclosure four decades ago. And that’s it. The place has sat there and done fuckall ever since. 

There’s a thick litter of cigarette butts and crumpled beer cans when they check it out in person, evidence that teenagers or vagrants put the four walls and insulation to use occasionally, graffitied depictions of the faceless man watching over them. Water still runs through the pipes but reeks of sulfuric stagnation as it drips from the kitchen sink in a steady little  _ plippliplplipplip _ . 

Dean blows a hole right through the center of the thing with rock salt and it doesn’t even flinch so ‘ghost’ is out. 

Sam chews over the conundrum over a stack of textbooks and microfilm reels, jotting down notes and running ideas aloud before he cuffs Dean in the shoulder with a blind swipe, declaring without hesitance, “It’s a totem.” 

“A totem?” Dean settles himself into the chair at Sam’s elbow, can smell the harsh, clean smell of the bar soap they share in the shower.

“Check it out, remember the graffiti on the main floor?” He rotates the open book on the counter. The page is open to a dense wall of text, packed together in tight columns and Sam taps on a specific paragraph, “Totems require community, depiction, and intention to manifest, and they can be summoned through evocation.” 

“You mean like  _ Candyman _ ?” 

“Exactly!” Sam snaps his fingers. “Exactly like  _ Candyman _ !”

Dean bobs his head along on a nod. “Okay - so what? How do we fight that? Stop talking about it? I didn’t watch the sequels, Sam.” 

“I don’t know.” Sam is grinning brighter than he was in his graduation photo. The mystery fires him up inside, sparks up something in the back of his eye. 

Sam takes to hunting like a fox does. There is something clever and bloodthirsty trapped inside of that boy. 

Dean imagines he could crawl closer, peek down Sam’s throat from between his canine teeth and see it peering back out at him with glowing eyes from the wet cavern of his insides. Wants to meet it.


	4. Noble County, OH

December in Iowa. You can’t kill a totem but you can trap it and they do. Sam adds a new page to the journal and helps pop Dean’s shoulder back into place after he gets bowled through a wall. It’s scary but Dean assures him that he did a much better job than Dean would have managed on his own.

The beer they tap at the neck afterwards is the best beer Sam’s ever had in his life. 

It’s a clear night in every direction over their heads. Dean reclines back against the windshield of the Impala on a well-worked groan. The other half of the bag of ice that’s packed and duct taped around his shoulder is with the rest of the six pack in the cooler. Sam eases down next to him. 

January in rural Maryland. Huddled under a thick blanket of barely northern snow and an endless expanse of evergreen trees, peaking in every direction towards the Appalachian Mountains. The snow shutters off the branches when a roar echoes from the depths of the forest and Sam finds himself flustered. “Goatman?  _ Goatman,  _ Goatman? Like,  _ The  _ Goatman?” 

Dean balks, snowdamp and rosy cheeked in the blank whiteness. “You’re such a geek.” 

February in Minnesota. A frozen night in the back of the car when there’s no more money and they’re laying low from local PD after a string of B&Es trying to track down a cursed puzzle box. Dean chatters him through every scene of the  _ Evil Dead  _ series once he catches wind that Sam has never seen it before. 

Sam twists himself into a nest of blankets in the back seat. He has to curl if he wants to lay his full body down and he brings the covers in close, over his head and across his mouth. Dean prattles over the beats and butchers an impression of Bruce Campbell past the witching hour. Sam drifts away somewhere after  _ Army of Darkness  _ starts. He wakes up in the morning and can’t remember where or when they are for a few seconds. 

March in a graveyard in Noble County, Ohio. Sam clocks the case on his own in the periodicals that the rangers use to communicate major events in the region. Wild animal attacks. Some sort of Bear or Cougar, even though the largest thing recorded in the immediate area is a coyote. 

It’s not a coyote. It’s not a bear or a cougar either.

The lurching, lunging form had been named Colin Carelli once upon a time and he had been a small town highschool football star. Type of kid that makes people proud to be from certain towns. The defensive linemen was affectionately known across the local counties as ‘The Beef’ not only for his massive, hulking size but also for his far-spread reputation for holding grudges.

Colin ‘The Beef’ Carelli died in a car accident in late October. And yet, here he is, suspended in the meatless moment after his death by the rudimentary incantations of his deeply bereaved girlfriend. Hungry. 

The reanimated corpse of Carelli has not kept well over the few months that it has been forced to shamble around the edges of the natural order of the world, missing the essential spark that keeps meat from rotting. Either a medical examiner or mortician had undertaken the task of piecing him back together months ago, before the funeral, and those threads are barely keeping the entire carcass sewn together now. The glove of flesh enclosing his hand slides away from the muscle underneath when a massive fist crosses Sam’s face.

Sam’s forehead bounces off a gravestone on the way down. 

Something gets knocked loose before he’s even all the way collapsed, ears ringing. An image. A surfaced memory of a dream he had once about a different graveyard. A different name on the tombstone. A hand holding his. 

A hand holding his. 

Colin Carelli’s fingertips start to peel away from his bones when he grabs onto Sam’s wrist and begins the staggering drag back towards the open grave. 

Sam comes back to the present kicking, shouting, “Dean!” and he sounds just like a little kid. There’s blood in his eye, graveyard dirt bedded up underneath his fingernails as he scrapes against the coarse grass for purchase. “ _ Dean! _ ” 

Carelli angles a dead-eyed look over his shoulder with the lower hinge of his jaw swinging loosely at one side from old threading. Sam kicks it the rest of the way loose, wheeling off into the darkness. 

The giant stumbles backwards, grip on Sam’s wrist slackening up and Sam scrabbles, reeling like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon character in the few seconds it takes for the behemoth to release him all the way. 

“Dean!” 

A gunshot, cracking off of the boundless edges of a midnight sky.

The impact connects into Carelli’s shoulder, sends him stumbling a half step backwards and gives Sam enough time to catch his wind. The corpse makes a noise, something loud and unstructured heaved up from whatever primal, animating force is keeping him ticking forward like a wind up toy. 

“Hey!” Dean, finally catching up with his bullets at a full sprint, a look on his face when he’s looking at something he wants to kill. There’s a gun in his hand and blood on his face and he is dangerous, feral. Colin Carelli’s frosted eyes sway back and forth between the two. Sam’s gun is in a hole somewhere between here and the shack-side of an empty church so he puts his empty hands up in fists. 

If he was a zombie he would have swung around on him, too. 

Dean tries to shoot and run at the same time, wings off in the wrong direction.

“Sam!” 

The Beef picks up momentum as he gains, hurtling forward like a rolling boulder down a steep hill, and, shit, Sam doesn’t remember high schoolers being this big when he was in school. He thinks about how bad it’s gonna hurt while he stares Carelli down in his cloudy eyes. Sam digs in his feet and grits his teeth like it's going to help. The blood from his forehead has made it to his chin, itchy down to his collarbone. 

He remembers when he used to feel like nothing could knock him down. Like he knew everything.

Carelli crushes over him like a tsunami. 

Teeth in Sam’s shoulder as he goes down, the entire dental print of Carelli’s upper pallet now unimpeded without his jaw. Sam screams until he hits the earth, sandstone rocks the size of his fist gouging in his stomach, blood and rancid saliva on his face. 

Another gunshot in the night, the grave marker next to Sam’s ear cracks open right before Dean is there, swinging and shouting in. One last gunshot. 

It’s brains and blood and little tiny grey fragments of skull, misting up into the air in a pulpy shimmer. A halo in the evening glimmer. It settles onto Sam’s cheeks and hair, his eyelashes like one of those early morning flurries in Rochester. 

“Let me see you,” Dean is tugging on him, stepping over the twice-dead corpse with blood sprinkled in around his freckles, saving Sam again. Hands on Sam’s face, he smells like gunpowder today. He presses the slick hair off of Sam’s forehead. 

April in Colorado for no actual reason that Sam can tell.

“You’re gonna love this,” Dean says. The grey, moonless twilight on all sides has just the slight hint of the morning glow to it, but it’s already lighting something up off the surface of his skin. 

Sam strings afterwards like a moth. Another one of Dean’s secret spots, hidden from the all-seeing and all-knowing, the path up the side of the mountain isn’t marked off by a trail or trampled down by the feet of hikers but Dean forges ahead with confidence. 

“My dad dragged me out here looking for a nest of tommyknockers when I was twenty. You would not believe what a bitch that was. Those little fuckers bite. It’s how I got this scar.” He twists backwards on the trail with two fingers hooked down the corner of his collar to show the full crescent of the raggedy scar that pokes out from the edges of his undershirts.

Sam squints in to see clearer in the low light and trips up on the uneven terrain. Before his knees can even buckle Dean is there, that same hand twisted up in Sam’s shirts now. 

“Stop it,” Sam shoves, slow in the morning. “Just let me fall.” 

“And risk missing the show because you fell halfway down the mountain? No way.” 

Most people swear by bibles or saints and scripture. Dean Winchester swears by weathered diners in the middle of nowhere and ominous billboards off the sides of major highways. He keeps telling Sam that the coffee at the next truck stop is going to quake his definition of ‘wired,’ that the pie from this farm stand is going to make every other piece of pie he’s ever had look like shit. 

He’s never wrong. 

A slate rock opening in the trees where there’s nowhere to grow opens up a hole over their heads to the sky and this must be it, the place he’s been leading Sam, because Dean folds himself down in the very middle. The pupil at the center of the eye, gazing upwards. 

He settles down next to Dean on his right side, the same mantle he’s taken upon himself for the last few months. Closer, than usual. It’s cold in the grey and Dean doesn’t bring any attention to the warm line they share along their hips and sides. 

The hole in the tree cover opens up the view down through the valley below, a glowing trickle of water carving through, and everything overhead. The color of the sky is just now beginning to define itself away from the thin threads of the clouds.

The whole of Sam's life before this was studying and scrounging. Jessica used to prod him, try and press him outside of his comfort zones and insist that he  _ try  _ to have fun, at least once in a while. He’d let her drag him out, to bars and clubs and parties and concerts. He’d twirl her around under his arm and hold her hair back when everything she drank came back up later, but it wasn’t his idea of fun. It isn’t the stuff he misses.

Dean’s brought a thermos of coffee with him, the thermos Sam has seen rattling back around the trunk of the car, above the trick floor that opens up to an armory. He offers Sam the mug and Sam takes it, sips on black, motel-grind coffee and watches the morning break. 

It’s too perfect. Too beautiful. Too much. It makes his chest ache and it’s uncomfortable to look directly at the brightness of it. The sun cracks the horizon like a choir note and holds there in a glowing wash and it looks just like the sunrise that shone off that beach in North Carolina, the one that shattered the skyline over the endless plains in Nebraska. It never fucking stops. 

It’s Dean in Arkansas and Dean in Alabama, it's Dean next to him when he’s sleeping and eating and brushing his teeth. It’s Dean that drags him through truck stops and laundromats, cramped cobwebbed cellars and shallow bogs. It’s Dean giving him a gun and a knife, and telling him how to use them. 

It’s Dean, not looking at the sunrise. 

May in Massachusetts and Sam finally has to breathe in. 

It occurs to him while he’s snarling Dean away like an injured animal that he has yet to actually kill anything himself. Sam has been getting his ass beat in every state on the eastern seaboard while Dean gets to light the match or pull the trigger. He gets the knife in the gut and Dean gets to gut somebody with a knife. 

“Sam! Let me see!” 

“Back off! I’m doing it!” 

He’s gotten good enough at patching up puncture wounds that he doesn’t need Dean’s help, no matter how much he hovers and paces behind Sam’s back, trying to crane a good view. It's shallow, anyway. Skin and muscle only. 

“That's it, I’m pumping the breaks!” Dean glowers and crosses his arms. “That car doesn’t move without me and I’m not moving until you get some rest. You  _ need  _ to get some sleep, Sam. Seriously.” 

Sam grumbles and wonders what Dean thinks he knows about what Sam needs, stepping out of the shower and into the foggy bathroom in  _ Chapel Hill Hotel _ , Room 6. 

The whole place is a little Victorian, playing into the whole Upstate Massachusetts thing. The sconces hanging next to the silver plated mirror are needlessly ornate, gothic. They cast shadows down the canyons of his cheekbones, like he's the one haunting this hotel bathroom. He sees himself from the other side of a peeling reflection. 

Like a stranger, Sam doesn’t remember the man looking back at him. 

New bruises blooming in purples and blues over his shoulders and ribs, clouding up around the square of gauze with a crimson sinkhole in the center. His muscles are more defined over his chest, in his arms. Hours he used to spend crouched over textbooks he now spends running from the cops. He still shaves clean, runs a single blade razor up over the line of his throat, accidentally nicks a cut. 

Dean is gone. 

They’ve been settled down more than a few days strung together, because _Dean insisted,_ and Dean has suddenly found himself with enough time to follow through on one of those promises he receives scribbled down on cocktail napkins. There’s an open offer in most back alley bars and side of the highway watering holes, those girls that stare back when Dean walks into a room. He asked Sam if he can take care of himself for an evening and, of course Sam can. He’s been twenty three years old for nearly a week now. 

It’s the first night he’s had to himself in seven months. 

He thinks that the space should be welcome, a little bit of fresh air away away from that lighter fluid, salted peanut smell of Dean Winchester.

He has new scars, now. Before there were blemishes, only a few that you could see down the corners of his sleeves or above his collar. His knee clicks when he stands up after being sat in the car for too long. 

The closer that Sam leans into the glass the blurrier the image gets, like the defining lines are smudging away. The bloodshot veins spider over the whites of his eyes. 

Dean is somewhere else, sinking into some girl because it had to be someone and it just happened to be her.

Fucking her, Sam’s aware. 

Once Dean exhausted the subjects of music and movies and food and roadside attractions he set in on providing an oral history of his own oral history. He spends peels of time describing things like breasts and mouths and tongues, details about all the things he does to them. 

If it had been one time - the first time, with Dean offhandedly mentioning missing tits and then teasing when Sam’s neck went blotchy and pink - that would have been one thing. Sam could stomach that. Of course that wasn’t it though. Dean isn’t going to let something that gets a rise out of Sam slide by unnoticed and, unfortunately for Sam, Dean Winchester’s list of conquests stretches from sea to shining sea.

“The things that this girl could do with her mouth - you wouldn’t believe. It was like she took a class. Cute little pigtails, too; something to hold onto.” 

“I know that you have some sort of disease that makes it impossible for you to feel shame but  _ stop it.  _ Seriously.” 

“Aw, peaches - am I making you blush?” 

Sam thinks that Dean thinks it’s going to cheer him up, or keep him distracted, or that this is just how boys talk to each other. Maybe he just thinks it’s funny how red Sam’s face gets every time.

“One thing I love more than eating pussy?”

“Don’t.” 

“Gettin’ head.” 

“You are unbelievable.” 

“Compliments, compliments.” 

He  _ insists  _ on telling Sam all the gory details about how they taste and what sounds they make when he presses his fingers up inside. Locks the doors of the Impala when Sam tries to jump out, pins him to the seat by speeding up and rattling off an anecdote about watching some bubblegum pink lips pressing over the head of his dick. Sam covers his face, looking out from between his fingers. 

Dean needles, too. That way he does, like Sam’s got some sort of secret that he’s keeping away. Like there’s any room in the car for the both of them, the guns, the knives, and a secret. 

“What about you, Sammy?” 

He’d met Jess his first week at Stanford.

“You look like you coulda been a heartbreaker.”

No, really. He met Jessica his first week at Stanford. 

“Aw, c’mon. If you can’t tell me, who can you tell?” 

Sam looks deeper into the bathroom mirror, smears the blood along the line of his pulse with an absent finger. 

He used to be himself, he thinks. Before he died. Before Dean started trying to crack open his skull and look around inside. Seven months, Dean has been disassembling him the way he did that gun the first day that they met. 

And then he’d found something else to keep him preoccupied for an evening. 

The water is too hot when he splashes it against his neck. 

Just the one bed, tonight.  _ Chapel Hill Hotel  _ had been down to their very last room when Dean dropped him off earlier, told him to salt the windows and not wait up. 

He settles uncomfortably, body stiff and heavy like a stone in the supple mattress. He sinks into the soft down, feels like he keeps sinking even as he drifts away. 

He dreams of Dean. One of those vivid nearly-there dreams with bright colors and tactile textures. Dean’s hands, the ones that are so twitchy and eager to touch. He dreams that Dean’s hands are on his face, smothering over his chin and nose with a broad, rough warmth. The flat plane of his palm smudges open his mouth and he hooks two fingers into the inner meat of Sam’s lip. His other hand is laid flat over Sam’s throat. 

The pads of Dean’s fingers taste like salt and iron. He pushes in. All the way. Knuckles to teeth.

Instinctively, pliantly, Sam’s jaw falls open and he laves at the digits, feels and flavors Dean’s fingerprints with the spread of his tongue pressed beyond the pad of Dean’s palm. Nearly to the difficult opening of his throat before drawing back away, like a pulse.

Dean stares and says nothing. 

When he pushes his fingers back inside it’s to skirt up the gums over Sam’s teeth. Dean’s gaze is curious, a quirk, a suspicion. He searches the upper pit of Sam’s lip like there’s something hidden up there. 

He presses. 

The open line of Sam’s throat grows longer the more he has to bow backwards to the insistent push of blunt fingertips. Dean hunts into the web where Sam’s cheek and gum line meet high up next to his cheekbone. 

He _ presses.  _

Punctures. 

Sam gasps. 

It doesn’t hurt at all when Dean starts to worm his way inside. Underneath the flesh, separating muscle and bone. It’s slick, intimate; the  _ push. _ Dean looks him in the eye while he burrows into Sam’s body, making more room.

“Confess,” the Dean in his dreams says with his palm cradling up behind Sam’s skull. 

Sam wakes up in the darkness, sweating. Hard. 

Dean is back. Asleep, facing in towards Sam. Like he falls asleep watching. He’s on top of the bedspread, boots still on like he collapsed right next to Sam and slipped immediately away into a blank, peaceful rest. His mouth smells tart and sweet like pussy. He crawled all the way back here to sleep above the sheets. 

Sam curls away, hole in his stomach stabbing him through all over again. 

He doesn’t know what Dean Winchester wants from him.

He still isn’t any closer to the reason why he’s even here at all. 

-

Dean used to copy down the titles of the books off Sam’s shelves, back when he had to jot them down on a stolen hotel stationary with a sharp ear listening for the front door creaking open. Back when he was waiting, before Sam was actually  _ here  _ here. He’d shuffle through school libraries then, crack those same titles open and try to get an idea of what the kid was thinking. 

_ Frankenstein _ ? 

Bummer. 

_ The Picture of Dorian Grey _ ? 

Downer. 

_ Anna Karenina _ ? 

Holy Shit. 

It was all so  _ old _ . So mature. He’d just always assumed that Sam didn’t have a sense of humor. John didn’t have a sense of humor. It wasn’t a leap, really. 

He’s not, like, regular funny. He doesn’t have any jokes and only started smiling a couple of weeks ago but the shit that he does say and do - god, it kills Dean.

The way that his face drops from some honey-sweet boy straight to bald agitation the second that a waitress turns away with a “Bless your heart,” right after Dean tells her it’s Sam’s birthday and they’ll need a piece of cake with two spoons. The half miserable “Aw,” that shocks out when he finally gets around to putting on the bundle of clothes they score from one of the thousands of thrift stores along the way. The fit of the thing is fine, it’s just the silver stamp portrait of a greyhound emblemed across the chest that catches him by surprise. 

Dean told him to try them on before they left but Sam’s always in some sort of rush.

A balm on a wound, Dean feels content all over. Pushing boundaries, testing limits - running away together. The world is conquerable. This is the way it is and the way it always could have been.

Makes him grin. Makes him laugh.

In fact, it takes about eight months before Sam does something that doesn’t make Dean laugh. 

“When was the last time that you talked to your dad?”

He’s reading the journal again when he says it, like there’s going to be something in there that he hadn’t caught yet. His tone is casual but Dean’s watching close enough to see that last critical flash of his glance. 

Dean feels himself get prickly all over. “Years.” 

“Hm,” Sam hums, turns a page. Nonchalant. 

“What? Spit it out.” The idea of waiting for the punchline grates on his nerves and Sam closes the book, gives Dean his full attention. 

“We’ve been at this for almost a year together, Dean.” He would have been a hell of a lawyer if this is the tone he was gonna use for his opening arguments. “I’m good at this.  _ We _ are good at this. We need to be working on whatever killed Jess. And your mom. We need to know what he knows.” 

“We  _ are _ working on it,” Dean defends. “We have that book on pyrotechnics we got from that psychic in Lexington.”

“Pyrokinesis,” he volleys in this shitty, superior tone without missing a beat. “And I’ve already read it twice.”

Dean’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. “I’m not calling him. It’s not up for discussion.” 

“I could talk to him, you wouldn’t even need to - ” 

“What part about ‘ _ not up for discussion _ ’ do you not understand, Sam?”

Sam slaps the dashboard, sudden and cracking in the dark car and Dean looks over sharply, tension mounting between the panes of glass casing them in. “You’re not being practical about this!” 

“Then maybe I’m impractical!” Dean snaps. A dog with a bone, did he think he was offering up enough to keep Sam preoccupied, to keep him interested? “If I never saw John Winchester again it’d be too god damn soon!” 

“Please,” Sam cuts in, teeth flashing from the snarling twist of his mouth. “Spare me your daddy issues, man. Your father dragged you all over? He drank too much? Forced you to run drills?  _ Everybody _ has a shitty father, Dean! My dad? Abandoned me when I was three. My mom was probably some prostitute junkie and neither of them ever bothered to write. Your dad taught you how to defend yourself and how to protect people?  _ That _ is the shit you get to keep!”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

Sam doesn’t like that answer, scoffs to himself and crosses his arms over his chest indignantly. 

“I’m not joking, Sam.” He makes this abundantly clear in his tone and his posture and he thinks if they were standing and facing each other right now it would be all he could do from laying his hands on Sam in some unforgiving ways. “You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.” 

“You’d rather let more people die than talk to your father?” Sam demands. 

The question is loaded. A trap. The answer is also a trap. Dean avoids it with a droning buzz of vexation burbling through his blood stream. It occurs to him for the first time that Sam might have been happier if John was the one that picked him up. Two of them together? Who knows. Might have had the whole thing figured out by now. 

“Dean!” 

“We are saving people’s lives, Sam. What we do is important!” He feels sick using his father’s arguments on Sam. It’s fucked up, like a joke. Dean imagines one of his father’s thousands of eyes is on him right now, chastising because he hasn’t been practicing his patience. 

“You said you were going to help me!” 

An odd thing - wanting something so much for so long and then having to experience anger towards it. Makes it worse, Dean thinks.

“Do you even know how ungrateful you sound? After everything that I’ve done for you? You asked me to take you with me and I did! I have taken you everywhere - given you everything! I’ve killed for you, Sam.” 

“Oh my god, fuck you, Dean. You didn’t do shit for me.” Mirthless, malicious. “You’d still be doing this, on the road and hunting monsters - you’d still be  _ doing this  _ if we never even met. This was all already going to happen, I’ve just been along for the ride!” 

This is another one of those perfect opportunities for Dean to come clean. The best time would have been the first morning they met, the next best time would have been yesterday, and the third best time is right now. Before it’s too late. 

Sam doesn’t know. Every time that Dean has ever killed has been for him.

“What are you gonna do after?” 

“What?” Sam reels back into the window, brow furrowed. 

“After you find it.” Dean looks straight ahead, down the barrel of the road laid out in front of them. Southbound, towards Louisiana. “After it’s dead. What are you gonna do?”

Sam doesn’t answer.

He thinks too much for it to have never crossed his mind.

-

Hurricane was ten months ago. The big one, that is. 

The one that broke the levee. 

The one that left everyone in a somber sort of mood. 

Delphine Jean Baptiste has been fortunate. She isn’t saying that she hasn’t been. She’d been hungry and rainwet the same as everybody, but she never lost anything she couldn’t live without. She’d never had to upheave. People come back drinking as soon as they could - just not the same way they used to before. 

Delphine has heard more sad stories in the last year of her life than the whole sum of them beforehand. She knows the bones need grieving. She doesn’t mean any disrespect. 

Is just...

She misses mischief.

Used to working bar Thursday and Friday and Saturday nights, watching the sun bleed away into the evening while polishing rocks glasses. That’s her music then. Crushing crowds lit up with casual conversations, churning bodies and catty laughter. Lovers, losers, loners, and mourners - she loves them each, tenderhearted to their nature.

This Tuesday midday bar shift? Not for she.

Is a favor for a sister worker of hers, needed the day off to see a doctor about some rawness of the throat. A way to spend a day, Delphine supposes.

She’s just trying to keep herself enthralled, s’all. 

“Can I top you off ‘ere, cher?” 

Baby Face been set up for a minute, came crawling past the squealing door hinges on just this side of noon. He requests some sweet tea, emphasis on  _ sweet,  _ because this boy is all civilized manners and soft hands. He humbles himself down from a towering height with hunched shoulders and a hush demeanor. One flash of the dimples and she’d been melted.

The boy sweats in the thick summer heat, seems flustered about it too and it’s Delphine’s first hint on top of the snow whiteness of him that he ain’t from around here. 

“Please,” he says, prim politeness and she tips a pitcher. 

His name is Sam and that’s all that she’s been able to drag out of him since he sat down at the farthest reaches of the flat, oak bar. He’s set up quick with a computer and stack of books and she almost has him confused with one of her missing college boys until she gets an eyeful of what he’s reading on. 

“Hoodoo, baby? On Wikipedia?” She laughs, the throaty sound of it filling the empty bar floor. 

He flushes and blusters, opposed to being called somebody’s baby, she thinks. Shame, she thinks. 

She shushes him silent with a loose rag, winks to let him know she doesn't bite.

“First time in New Orleans?” A conversational observation. She keeps a look out the corner of her eye, lets herself linger on the vision of his fingers wrapping around that sweaty glass. 

“First time I’ve been anywhere,” he says, earnest in his sweet boy face. 

“Anywhere, anywhere?” she queries. “Or just anywhere important?”

He laughs, once and softly. “Anywhere, anywhere.” 

“What brings you to town?” She braces up on her elbows on the other side of the bar from him, the standing side. “Mais, lemme guess, lemme guess. You a…DC boy?”

He laughs again and Delphine would rub it into her skin like a lotion if she could. “New York.”

“Shit,” she grins. “Business or pleasure?”

“Uh… business.”

“Hoodoo business?” Delphine razzes, jerking her chin towards his computer screen. 

Tips of his ears going pink all over again.

“I’m teasin’, cher,” she giggles, flicks the far end of the rag at him. “‘Sides, if you’re lookin’ for hoodooin’ you're already in the right place.” 

She got his attention now, fox eyes focused fully for the first time. Big broad shoulders, the sweat of him causes clinging. She fans herself idly in the heat.

“You know about hoodoo?” he asks. 

She laughs again, head tossed back. Childish questions from childish boys who’ve never been anywhere, anywhere. 

“Lemme see this hand here,” she purrs, amusement still warm off her tongue. “I’ll read your fortune.”

Baby Face puts together that she really is nothing but fun all at once, gives a cute little huff about it but gives her his hand just the same.

_ Marie’s Lounge  _ is the name of the place. What it was before somebody saw fit to install a kegerator Delphine does not know. White stucco walls and wrought iron gallery balcony that seems smaller somehow without bodies filling it up. Tall ceilings to trap the sticky heat over their heads, tall windows with the shutters open to let in that intense westward afternoon sun. 

When he leans in she can smell the rich boyness of him. 

She uses both of her thumbs to press out his loose fingers, uncurling the width of his warm, wide palm. Baby Face got hands that are just being broken in, it seems. Pink and silver scars. Barely healed blisters and brand new calluses. She tilts his hand from side to side, playfully inspecting the roughness of his fingertips while he huffs up another one of those short smiles. 

“See here.” She points, draws a scrawling line up the length of his humid palm slowly just to see if she can’t press some gooseflesh outta him. “This your love line. See how long?” 

He tilts his chin in, flexes his hand out. 

She whistles, long and low. “Somebody must sure love you, cher. Forever and a long time.” 

He got a look on his mug like he’s about to tell her otherwise when those creaky, cranky, squealing door hinges get going and Delphine looks up just in time to see that first, real expression that comes across Green Eyes’s features. 

Sour boy with a face that’s still too handsome by half when he’s glaring. He brings an atmosphere in with him, drags it through the door between his clenched teeth the way cats with kills do. No empty space can escape his presence. 

Delphine gets a caught feeling at once - the way she hasn’t since her gigi died. Like she got one hand in the cookie jar and the other in Mrs. Jean Baptiste’s purse instead of where it actually is, providing perch to a set of busted knuckles. Certainly not the expression she’s used to from young men seeking to quench their thirst. 

“Dean.” Baby Face turns and his hand is gone. 

“Sam.”

Ah.

They fill up the whole empty room with the space between those two words. 

Delphine can scent a stale spat in the air like a shark. Can’t imagine it’s more than a minute old from the stink. She could get a good guess as to the root of it, too; if she watched hard enough, long enough.

“We’re good to hit the road whenever you’re done packing up your pencils, princess.” Green Eyes helps himself to a seat, edges in closer to his companion than Delphine anticipated from the heaviness of his attitude. 

“That was fast.” No more dimples now. No more bright or polite either, storm shutters drawn in tight.

“Yeah, well,” the man called Dean smiles like a grimace, sore and surly, “Told her I wasn’t much for pillow talk.” 

Salacious. 

But not the source of their quarrel. 

They breathe in tandem, chests rising at the same pace. Each agitated. 

“Something to drink?” Delphine slices into the silence from the side.

“None for me, thanks.” Green Eyes is all bared teeth and pinched up corners. “I’m driving.” 

She runs him a water but sees how he scans the labels off every bottle on the wall behind her.

“Eighty more miles to Assumption Parish - you learn anything useful while you were in here playing pattycake?” 

Faced where neither one of them can see, Delphine rolls her eyes on Baby Face’s behalf. 

Travel is part of the business, clearly. Whatever kind of work would drive them out into the long, flat lots in Assumption Parish. Wasn’t much out that direction to begin with and there’s been even less to speak on over the last year. There’s signs of life right next door, over in that Thibodaux, Houma cluster that connects back to the big city like a disjointed limb. It’s got all the fixings for society - chapels, academies, strip clubs - and you could walk the distance if you were so inclined, not that Delphine would recommend it. 

Close enough to things that are lively, nights get too dark in Assumption Parish for she. 

She would’ve pegged them each for travellers even if she wasn’t eavesdropping. Baby Face puts his bags back together with efficiency, everything light and prepared to be packed back away at a moment’s notice. Green Eyes hasn’t stopped bouncing his knee since he sat down. Restless thing.

He jitters, twitches, toying with the heavy base bottom of his water glass and waiting for an instance where the other boy turns away from him - an opening. 

The window is only there for a moment, the brief stretch of time when the last pieces of the spread are getting tucked back into the bag they come from and Baby Face is looking all the way down. 

She sees the tremor that runs through the electric space underneath the older boy’s palm, hovering a bare inch off Sam’s shoulder. 

He puts his hand back down.

A grin coils over Delphine’s lips. 

That’s it there. That’s the one. 

A secret. 

A good one too, by the stress of it around the corners of his mouth. An overripe pear - type of secret that drips juices down your chin when you bite into it. 

His shriveling gaze is a parched gasp and the question he’s asking is, “ _ Please? _ ”

She chuckles, low and to herself as she pulls a bottle off the top shelf. 

Couillon. 

Baby Face, for his part, doesn’t seem to know anything that isn’t written down in front of his nose. But  _ damn  _ does he seem to know that. He’s rattling off a list of cold facts about the parish faster than his breath should reasonably be able to accommodate, nothing but the dry truth. Helps him drown out anything else the other boy might be wanting to say, Delphine thinks. 

He only sees the thing from his own perspective. A limited vantage.

She sets up a shot glass in front of each of them. 

They look up to her in tandem, beautiful boy faces open next to each other and eyes angled in the same direction. 

“Is on me,” she smiles with a wink, hands up where Green Eyes can see ‘em. “Laissez les bon temp rouler, yeah?”

One shrugs to the other. They reach like they rehearsed it, slug ‘em back and the glasses hit the bar on the same, resounding,  _ clack.  _

Their mouths twist the same way in the same moment, a similar shudder shivering through their shoulders. Is uncanny, in a way. Eerie, maybe. Separate boy bodies with the same thread stringing them together. Stab one, the other would wince. 

She bets if she pressed her ear up against each of their chests the beating of their hearts would be synchronized into the same underbeat. A symptom of lovesickness. 

If Delphine had more time she’d be inclined to get them drunk for fun. See what they look like sloppy and then sling them at one another, see what sticks. 

But there is no more time for them here. Business calls. 

Baby Face says, “Thank you,” and Green Eyes settles up for a sandwich and a sweet tea he didn’t partake of. 

The tall one follows the taller one out the door, can’t keep his eyes to himself, and she shakes her head before polishing away the last traces of them from the bartop. 


	5. Assumption Parish, LA

The news hit the radio waves last week like an old fashioned science-fiction audio show, some shit that Orson Welles would have hoovered up with a side of lobster. Local man accused of murdering local woman - caught on surveillance cameras at local ATM breaking into local home but also, simultaneously, on video at local gas station reheating a frozen burrito for $1.75.

They come into town from the east, driving past a crucifixion march of telephone poles and washed out side roads, an endless reel of boarded up windows and battered down foundations. 

He and Sam are private detectives today. Sam has more patience sorting through the racks in the thrift stores when it comes to solving murders than he does for dressing himself on the daily, so they actually look the part with suits and belts and shoes, the whole thing. The first stop is to the gas station, pulling the video footage of Adam  Beaumont  gorging himself indecently on what looks to be chewy flour tortilla and more refried beans than anything. Clearly he hadn’t thought this particular burrito would be the one used in court to potentially exonerate him for murder. 

From there Sam wants to see the guy’s house, check out his bookshelves, and they get as far as the front entrance before the guy’s roommate blocks the door with the full width of his shoulders. 

His name is Neil Nash, Mr. Nash if you’re a student in the private school the next city over, and he gives Sam some smartass answer when Sam asks him where he was the night before last.

“Well, I wasn’t helping my roommate stab that girl to death,” Neil says - and then, “Sorry, sorry. I’m stressed out. This week has been the craziest thing. Nothing feels real anymore.” His voice cracks perfectly, eyes watering. Something flicks in Sam’s features, a tenderness in his expression and sympathy held in the soft line of his mouth. 

Dean makes it a point to not turn his back on Neil Nash. 

His eyes track the volley of their conversation without contributing, a back and forth that barely strays from the bizarre incident in question. He watches the blush that rises up on Sam’s cheekbones when Neil Nash pats the broad side of his shoulder as they part ways. 

“You get his number?” Dean snarks once they’re out of earshot, despite the fact that he was standing there the whole time. 

Sam doesn’t blush or stutter a beat. Just says, “You think I should go back and ask?” with this smartass look on his face. He smiles like a dare. 

Dean waves him off with an irritated brush of his hand, rolling his eyes as he goes. There’s an endless cicada drone in the hazy summer air and a growling storm brewing up in the flat distance. 

The air inside the car is stagnant, empty without the music playing. 

“Witches. Body Snatcher. Time travel,” Dean rattles off guesses, tries to break up the atmosphere in the car with an ice pick. “Adam from the future came back to murder Angeline.” 

Sam hums an uninvolved note, doesn’t look up from the book in front of him.

A full week of this shit. Dean kneads at his temple, agitated. He’s craving a drink for a long minute before they pull into the lot of the bank, gazing across the street to the row home Angeline Hebert was murdered in. The ground is already soft and wet, spongy under their feet from the heavy rains that have swept through the dense, twisting greenery over the last week. There’s stillwater laying in flat planes across the cracked roads for miles in every endless direction. 

It takes surprisingly little work to get into the bank. Dean’s ready with a whole song and dance but Daytime Security is older than the building itself, sizes them up on gut alone from behind a set of glasses thicker than his pinky instead of asking them for their identification. 

Gives Dean the false impression that they’re going to get this over with quickly. 

“You know, I have met more police officers this last week than since this bank was opened in 1964,” his voice warbles and no matter how close Dean crowds him he will not move faster. “Here to look at the tapes.” 

“Yeah, we’re here to see the security tapes,” Dean cuts in, desperate to make it past the threshold of the lobby so he can wrap up this sweaty bitch of a day with a beer. 

“I know what you’re here to see!” 

“Leonard.” Sam smiles like a good gosh darn kid, gives Dean a break for the first time since they crossed into Louisiana. “We’re just trying to help.” 

Leonard settles and grumbles, burbling up bulldog jowls as he keys in the door code for the security office. “I didn’t even want that ATM on the street, but nobody asked me before they installed it.” The pad flashes red under his trembling finger. He begins the six digit code over again. “Everything inside of this bank is secure. Never robbed, not even stuck up, not once. Almost fifty years.”

The pad flashes green and the lock trips audibly. It takes the whole weight of Leonard’s body to crack the massive mahogany door.

“It’s not just walls either. It’s the floors, too.” A ring full of keys and another door. Dean’s eye starts to twitch. “Don’t see the point of putting an electric box full of money out on the street after Mr.  Laissard went through the extra trouble of reinforcing the floors.” 

The door to the AV office opens like a finish line. Dean edges around the other side of Leonard before he can pry the key back out of the lock. 

Sam didn’t realize it was a race for the one desk chair until it's too late and Dean is already smug about it, gloating with his presence. 

“Hey, Leonard?” Sam calls. “My partner wants to know why they reinforced the floors.”

“The sewers!” His voice carries in the small room, off of the glass monitors streaming the feeds from the cameras and Dean winces. “Main sewer runs right up underneath this building, young man. Nothing to stop a man with a mind for it from coming straight up through the floor. They’d come right up into the vault if it weren’t for that extra enforcing.” 

Adam  Beaumont  enters into the frame from the left, natural in his movements and demeanor. He glances over his shoulder to the other side of the street as he crosses, opens himself up to the full view of the camera so there’s no real denying. It’s really, really Adam. 

“Well, there you have it, kids.” Leonard chimes in, unhelpful as he shuffles back out to the hall, just as slow as he was on the way in. “Hope it was what you were looking for.”

Dean winds the video footage backwards, forwards, backward again. 

“Hold on,” Sam taps at the screen, leaning in close, closer. “What’s that? There.” 

He tracks it backwards, plays it forward at an eighth of the speed. 

“There.”

A shuttering flash of white in his eye, reflecting in the light, the way a predator’s do. 

Sam frowns. “The fuck does that mean?” 

-

_ Motor Bar  _ is as good of a name as any and Dean gets himself set up with a cold beer, something greasy to eat, an open case, and Sam under his arm. What else could he ask for?

Really. He’s asking. He’s felt like shit since the argument. Sam hasn’t done anything funny in days. 

“I couldn’t find anything that matched exactly in the journal.” Sam ignores the hush puppies Dean ordered, has barely touched his beer. He darts a look around, still won’t sit closer than the distance of the passenger seat. “A few almost-matches. There’s still too much on the table. I need more, I need to rule things out.” 

Dean rubs up along his chin, sees Sam’s eyes see his mouth and his jaw. They still need to get into the apartment. 

“Uh,” a voice, a crack of a note cutting into their conversation from behind. “Excuse me?”

It’s Neil fucking Nash. Dean can barely hold down a groan.

“Becker, right?” Neil taps a finger in their direction, not looking at Dean. “Sam Becker.” 

“Sam,” Sam offers with a generous smile and the full attention of his chest and shoulders, taking a quick sip off his drink. “What are you doing here?”

The whole rest of Dean’s night rapidly goes to shit. 

“Oh me?” He smiles and scrubs at the back of his neck. Blond hair, blond beard, brown eyes, with these tortoise shell glasses, he’s like something a teen girl would scissor out for a scrapbook. “My friends, they brought me out.” He gestures over his shoulder to two men seated at the other side of the bar, watching and grinning. “They know it’s been a…very, very weird week.” 

“I bet,” Sam chuffs. “I just want to say again, man. I’m sorry about what happened to your friend. It’s a really bizarre situation.” 

“Well, I do feel better knowing that you’re on the case.” A hopeful, open smile. 

Dean retches audibly. 

“Excuse me, for just one second.” 

Gouging fingers into Dean’s shoulder, he rolls his head and his eyes on the way up to see Sam’s contrite expression. 

“If you’re gonna be such a cow, maybe you should find some more agreeable company,” Sam says, eyes darting a pair of ladies with a pair of martinis that they’re whispering behind as they gawp in Dean’s direction.

Dean purses his lips, dissatisfied with the dismissal. “You know he wants to fuck you, right?” 

Sam scoffs. “C’mon, Dean. You’re better than this.” 

Dean has no clue where Sam got that idea.

-

Honestly? It’s just good detective work. He knows where Neil Nash is going to be for at least the next hour. Give or take depending on how interesting he thinks Sam’s critical analysis of  _ Ghostbusters  _ is once he really gets going about how Dan Akryod used to watch his parents conduct seances as a kid.

He hits the ground on the inside of the French Colonial through a window that he clocked earlier from where they parked out on the street. 

Sam’s going to feel so stupid later. He was playing middle school grab-ass while Dean cracked the case. He can’t wait to rub it in. 

The layout of the house is square rooms with tall doors that lead directly into one another, from a kitchen to a living room to a bathroom to a bedroom - Dean knows that it’s the right one from the photos of Adam Beaumont and family posted up on the wall. 

It’s clear that the police have already been through the bedroom and taken what they needed. The CPU is missing off the wires next to the desk and the shelves were turned out and stacked back together inelegantly. 

He sniffs back through it, looking for anything nobody else would be looking for. 

The actual crime scene is a few blocks away and Dean had the rest of the afternoon to poke around over there while Sam roasted a rotation of neighbors about where they were and who they saw, when. It looked like a regular murder. Savage, but average.

Angeline Hebert had not died cleanly. Fingernails lifted off the beds, teeth loosened from her gums - there was no inch of her left unbattered before whatever was left was abandoned to cool in her own home. 

Blood on the ceiling, blood on the floor, no symbols or sigils or gnawed on bitemarks. 

Adam doesn’t have any occult books or twine wrapped hex bags stuffed into the crevices of the bedroom. There’s nothing hiding inside of his pillowcase and nothing written down in his notebooks. He rolls his dirty socks together before he puts them in the laundry basket, which is weird, Dean guesses. 

Dissatisfied for the second time that night, he wanders. 

Across the floor, the cracked door to what must be Neil’s room. Dean gnaws down the last of the dill pickle spears out of the fridge and makes his way over at his own leisure, tilting the frames on the hall wall. 

He pokes around in the dark, ducking his head to read the titles off the comic books stacked up on a bookshelf. One of those laminate topped particle board desks with a sleeping monitor paired to a keyboard consuming the majority of the surface space. Dean flicks over the aluminum can of generic brand energy drink next to the mouse pad. The dregs leak over the desk and drip off the corner. 

Neil Nash plays the guitar and collects Ian Fleming novels. The inside of his closet looks like the inventory room of a  _ Banana Republic,  _ all placid earth tones and conservative cuts. 

It’s the whole thing. The clean vegetables stored in neat containers in the refrigerator. The 55’’ TV in the living room. The framed degree on the wall. 

Dean sits on the edge of the mattress. The feather down quilt sighs out around him. 

Everything that Dean has ever had to offer fits into the back of a car. 

Sam could have all of this shit again. In an instant, if he wanted it. Could get set up with a new identity in a new town, whenever he wants. He could leave. 

He is going to leave. Someday. 

The front door blunders open like a tornado. 

Dean startles upright, a shot of cold adrenaline cutting him down to the quick. The window on the other side of the bed, there’s not enough time or space for him to clear and escape before the blundering hits the doorframe and Dean is stuck, crowded up inside the closet, underneath those camel suit sleeves in the dark. 

Drunk and stumbling, the laugh cracks through the wall and right into Dean’s forehead. 

Sam’s laugh. 

Sam is here. Followed Neil Nash all the way back home before 10:30pm.

“I have to be back before the bar closes,” he titters, a skittish little tremor in his voice. 

“Bars don’t close ‘til four. I’ll get you back before then.” There’s a grin in Neil’s voice, a tease and a breathiness. “Partner won’t even notice you’re gone.” 

For one insane moment Dean imagines how fucking funny it would be if he walked out of the closet right now. He imagines standing up and strolling out into the bedroom casually, imagines acting surprised and outraged in the middle of Neil Nash’s bedroom like he was expecting to be somewhere else. He bets the look on Sam’s face would be hilarious but then Neil says, “You ever done this before?” and nothing is funny at all. 

Like someone cracked an egg over Dean’s head, the true reality of what is happening seeps through from the roots of his hair downward. The bed squeaks and creaks as a heavy body is pushed down on top of it. 

Dean hadn’t actually thought that it would get this far. Sam hasn’t looked up from a book in seven months. Dean thought that he had more time. 

“N...no.” The word is a blush. 

Dean presses the back of his head against the closet wall. When he squeezes his eyes shut it’s easier to hear the sounds from in the bedroom, the shifting fabrics and the wet, crackling sound of a mouth on bare skin. 

“Really?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing!” A laugh, charming and disarming. “Just, you’re so cute. Thought someone woulda eaten you up by now.”

It’s the hanging weight that he leaves on the word ‘someone’ that gets Dean itching. 

“Tell me a secret,” Neil says.

“No.” 

“Aw, I’ll tell you one of mine.”

“Yeah?”

“I want you to suck my cock.” 

Dean buries his face in his hands. His cheeks are hot. He’s not above squeezing his palms over his ears and pretending that he’s somewhere else, someone else. Puts the whole thing between his knees and squeezes those in, too. Hard enough to make head hurt and cage in the cynical, pumping sound of his frantic heartbeat, but not hard enough to drown out, “Now you tell me one of yours.”

“I’ve never sucked a cock before.” Sam says ‘cock’ the way that people who don’t talk dirty say cock. 

“I already knew that. It’s supposed to be a secret.” 

“I don’t have any secrets.” 

“Don’t believe that; not for one second. Everybody has secrets. Something that nobody else knows.”

Dean’s fingers slip away from the curl of his ear. 

“I cheated on a math test in seventh grade.”

Neil Nash cackles, delighted and intoxicated. “I’m a teacher! You can’t be telling me this! Did you get caught?”

“No!” Sam splutters and laughs, gets kissed on the corner of the mouth by the sound of it. 

“Tell me another one!”

A hesitation. “I don’t know how to ride a bike.” 

“No!” Neil gasps, giddy. “More!” 

Sam snickers and Dean seethes. Smoldering, his face and his hands are so hot he thinks that it might just be enough to tinder the cottons and cashmeres draping over his shoulders. He clenches his jaw until his teeth creak.

“I hate Metallica.”

Why is Sam giving this to him? He makes Dean work so god damn hard for it all the time, but Neil Nash gets to waltz in like nothing and demand secrets with an open palm? And Sam just  _ gives it to him _ ?

Is this what Sam wants? The thought is a dark, hot twist in his stomach and it prickles over the skin on the back of his neck. To be pressed open?

Is this the only way to get to the inner meat? Straight through the muscles and the flesh. 

He can feel the aching flex of his heart pumping the adrenaline through his body. Fucked up, fucked up, fucked up - he breathes heavily, tries to ground himself in the feeling of clawing down the goosebumps at the base of his skull. 

Is this the thing that Sam would need in exchange for that last piece? 

Dean borrows clothes and meals and liters of gasoline, salt and bullets and silver plated crosses that he uses to purge infection from the festering holes in the natural world. He borrows huffs of sugary perfume from the humid necks of giggling girls in the backs of bars and cars. He borrows snatches of brightness thrown over black roads by hanging streetlights. 

None of that shit matters to him. 

There has only ever been one thing that has actually belonged to him. 

Dean doesn’t know if he’s going to be able to live like this, knowing what he knows now. That there’s a hole in Sam. That he possesses the capability of filling it. That Sam doesn’t want him to have it. 

Dean wants to beat his head against the wall the way the Henryetta Howler did. 

It’s over fast once Sam actually gets around to putting his gag reflex where his mouth is.

Dean stuffs his ears with linen dress shirts and suede coat sleeves until Neil Nash finally makes this, “ _ Ah - ah - ah _ ” sound that makes Dean’s skin crawl. 

Neil Nash does not offer to return the favor and Sam does not insist. 

They part ways slowly, less giggling than the beginning.

“I have to get going,” Sam says before Neils walks him out. 

-

Dumb, disoriented, delirious, Dean needs to get the  _ fuck  _ out of here. He’s gotta - he’s gotta -  _ go.  _ Whatever direction is ‘Out.’

He stumbles into a corner, can’t remember which doors he’s already opened and which ones are brand new, doesn’t think that there should be so many. He needs an exit - he needs to be where there’s air.

Dean’s brain is a brick, all critical thinking skills abandoning him in a desperate bid to keep him from thinking any thoughts at all. If his mind stays in a blank, neural buzzing state then he never, ever has to acknowledge what just happened. Like a hanging neon sign: “ _ VACANCY”  _

He opens a door frame onto a tall stack of cardboard boxes, a different door onto a dripping vanity sink in the half bathroom, a different door onto a folded ironing board and a dead body. 

The stiff pitches forward into the hall and hits the floor with a heavy, hollow  _ thud _ .

Which. 

Huh.

Dean stares at the corpse at his feet numbly. 

Because Neil Nash has clearly been dead for days. 

A sudden shatter burst of pain cracks over the dome of Dean’s head and the lights go all the way out. 

-

Sam crawls back into the motel room and the bed next to him is flat. 

He frowns, disquieted. 

He wonders if he feels better. Like he’s re-established some of his independence. Like he’s learned something new about himself. 

He’d taken the time to sort through Adam’s room, too, while he was there. Hadn’t found anything interesting to report there, either. He’s just…restless. Listless. 

The motel room is uncomfortably still. The same way that it was last night when he curled into bed, the night before that, too. A chill shudders up his spine, one of those no-reason tremors. Palms rasping, he rubs over his own arms and takes his time getting into the shower. 

Dean’s not back by the time he steps out in a steam cloud and Sam finally gets worried enough to call, gets the voicemail. He twists his mouth down and checks out the window.

The Impala is there. 

Sam’s stomach pits out underneath his ribs, leaves him open and exposed all the way to the back of his spine. He barely remembers to pull on a shirt as he half-jogs out the door. Maybe he’s just being a little brat. Petulant the way that Dean can sometimes get when Sam says things that he doesn’t want to hear like, “No,” or “Go away.” Sleeping in the back of the car, maybe. 

The glass fogs under his breath and his splayed hands as he peers in. Empty front seat, empty back seat. 

He calls Dean’s phone again while opening the door, gets voicemail again. 

“Where the fuck are you? Call me. Asshole.” 

Somewhere Dean would go on his own without the car. With someone else, maybe. Or going somewhere covert, somewhere he wouldn’t want to be heard or noticed. Somewhere within walking distance? Somewhere without parking?

He punches in Dean’s phone number again. He leaves another voicemail. 

Probably just found some other girl to slink home with, Sam assures himself. 

Some girl that he let drive? 

He calls again. Voicemail again. 

Back in the motel room Sam punches on the television for some white noise, just needs something going on and the local news station seems neutral and informative while he’s pacing back and forth, losing his mind. 

He’s calling again, fretting over his lower lip when the hum catches his attention, a droning buzz thrumming around from inside the room. He pokes around, dives into the comforters and sheets in Dean’s bed, turns out a cell phone. 

_ Incoming: Sammy _

“Breaking!” 

Sam looks up, slow and shocked. 

The television in front of him reels out the story on a spool of red tape, emphasizing  _ BREAKING!  _ In bold letters. 

There’s a clip, some security footage running on a loop behind the running commentary by a bright-voiced woman with more details on a developing situation outside of town, armed robbery, assault, victims in critical condition, assailant on foot. The video shows a window cracking in a spiderweb, splintering out from a sourced hole in the center before a figure, a tall man with shoulders that shuffle and swing the way Sam has been watching for nearly a full year now. 

Dean looks up over his shoulder, makes contact with the security camera like he knows Sam is watching somewhere else. He can’t play it back, can’t pause the live feed, but swears that he can see a flash of predatory white in his eyes. 

The phones drop from Sam’s numb hands. 

Empty, open fingers and knees folded up underneath of himself on a bed that doesn’t belong to him - Sam is twenty three years old and three years old simultaneously. Alone, in a world full of horrible potential. 

The realization is an anesthetic, creeping over his flesh in a trickle. No connections, no resources, Sam hasn’t even killed anything yet. He loses the feeling in his face and his eyes start to sting from staring too long at the screen. What would he do without Dean?

What is he going to do without Dean?

No. 

He’s up on his feet, pacing the room, sweating. Dean isn’t dead until Sam says he’s dead. 

He’d know, anyway, this is ridiculous. Dean’s not dead. He’d know - he would have felt it, that hole in his stomach would have opened up the moment that the universe changed, like that knife to the gut in Massachusetts, the one that he got for his birthday. 

You are a smart boy, Sam. 

He pulls the number off an unanswered thread of text messages, the same one he saw that first day. He crosses the boundary like it’s a physical barrier and presses ‘Send’ on Dean’s cellphone. 

The line rings once.

“Dean.” The word resonates out of the speaker and echoes in wilting vibrations through the caverns between Sam’s bird bones. “Where are you?” 

The tone of it, the depth. 

Sam’s mouth gets stuck open on a small, dry parting. 

He had something lined up for this, something good, something like, “Your son is missing, I need your help,” but he forgets it in an evaporation - honestly thinks he might be forgetting everything because the feeling isn’t really deja vu. Like his brain is leaking out of him, a cold drip of subreality dribbles down Sam’s spine from the very base of his skull. It reminds him of something that he used to know, should know, something that keeps slipping through his fingers. 

He’s silent too long, a whole beat in an empty room. 

There’s a crackle on the other side of the line, a shifting of papers, a weight settling upright. 

“Sam?”

Sam hangs up the phone. 

-

Dean rouses around to the vision of Neil Nash. 

The dead one. 

The cavern is a stone cathedral around and over top of them, as old as some of the oldest things he’s seen in southern Louisiana so far - leaning churches and rusting wrought iron fences. The ceiling arches up overhead, several tunnels and routes coming to a point at a central hub. A red foghorn light spirals around and around from the top of a looped metal ladder that leads up somewhere where there must still be starlight. It casts long, spiraling shadows around the cavern and doesn’t do anything to settle Dean’s queasy stomach. 

Underneath of him, in a place nauseatingly far away, there’s the sound of rushing water and the smell of foul runoff.

Dean blinks hard, tries to get his vision to sharpen and reflexively moves to rub into his brow before cold metal cuffs gouge into his wrists. He groans and cranes around as best he can. The pipe he’s tethered around is broad and sturdy, anchored into the raised platform he and Neil are lying on. There’s another walking ramp, it looks like. Below the grate, connected by a steep spiral staircase, a stone platform that accesses the blackwater river below. 

Dean tries to breathe through the clutter and the vertigo. 

Neil’s hollow face in black. Neil’s hollow face in red. 

The sound of footsteps is uncanny in its familiarity, something he’s never heard approaching before. From a previously impossible angle, Dean looks up from the grated metal platform to meet the metallic clang of footsteps. 

There was no other situation that he would have been able to sincerely experience - raw and unfiltered - the last thing that any monster he’s ever killed has seen. 

Dean is looking at Dean.

He’s taller than he thought he would be, from the position of the ground. The creature reflecting his image knows how to wear it, beyond that surface level mirror there’s a genuine spark that belongs to Dean and telegraphs a clear train of emotions in well worn ways.

There’s real, genuine malice on that face. 

“I thought it was gonna be you. Soon as I saw you.” He  _ tsk _ s with his tongue against Dean’s teeth, shaking his head. “Too many loose ends around here. Knew I fucked up with that frozen burrito shit. Matter of time before somebody came sniffing around. And you?” He whistles and it’s  _ Dean’s  _ whistle. “Hunters, man.” 

“Shifter,” Dean sneers and his vision swims. “I gotta say, the face is definitely an improvement.” 

The other him scoffs. Agitation masked as amusement, Dean knows it as plainly as he sees it. Knows the twitching jump of the muscles jerking as an experience from the mirrored side of it, can read the whole show on display. 

“Pretty quick for somebody who just got bonked on the noggin’,” the standing Dean drolls, sardonic. “It’s really bad for you when you black out like that, by the way.” 

Dean tries to think about sitting up, pukes instead. 

“Anyway, buddy, I gotta go put some miles on this new face. I borrowed your guns and your knives. But I’ll be back once I grab some party supplies and find your brother - ”

Shit. 

“Oh yeah, I know all about that. I know about everything. This shit up here,” the shifter’s eyes roll back in his head, the thin white of them ghoulish in the darkness. “Delicious. Dean Winchester, you are  _ the  _ most interesting person I’ve ever turned into.”

He shuffles and settles down, crouches closer to Dean’s level, like their conversation is getting more intimate, conspiratorial. That flashing red light throws long shadows down from his brow, swallows up his eyes. 

“I’m thinking about bringing him back here to make you watch me fuck him again before I kill you both. That’d be pretty messed up, huh?” The shifter laughs with  _ his _ voice and Dean can understand why Sam hates the sound sometimes. 

He’s even closer then, nose bumping up against the line behind Dean’s ear like he can  _ smell  _ and there’s nowhere for Dean to cringe away _.  _ “Can you imagine? The look on his face?” He breathes in deeply, a cold crawl over Dean’s scalp. “It’ll be a gift; a little treat for both of us. Because - I gotta tell you. Your brother’s mouth?” The contented little hum shudders from the back of his throat and he licks a wide, wet line up into Dean’s hair, through the blood and sweat. “Felt like heaven. I’m gonna fucking tear him apart and you’re finally gonna get to see his insides.” 

“I’ll kill you.” Dean promises with his hands tied behind his back. “I will fucking kill you.” 

The laughter echoes all the way out after him. Dean sees red in an endless, echoing flash of light.

-

Sam empties himself of everything except for what he knows. There is no time and no room for anything else.

Clearing the inside of his jumbled mind is like clearing off a chalky blackboard with a steaming rag. He can do this, he just needs the facts. None of that shit he thinks he might have dreamed up in a different lifetime. Everything that isn’t  _ real  _ is just a distraction, the flies on the windshield that clutter up the road already laid out in front of him. 

A map. He needs a map. He needs to see what it looks like from above - how everything connects. There’s an atlas. The one that he’s seen in Dean’s hand when he’s packing up their moving road show.

Gravel in his kneecaps, cut through as the denim finally gives out against the earth. It’s a fucking Three Stooges skit out here with Sam alone on his bloody knees in the middle of a barely filled parking lot before 1:00am. He pulls an endless, ridiculous thread of objects out of the backseat: a teddy bear Dean insisted on winning him at a carnival in New Jersey; a sigiled bowie knife; the laptop papered over with stickers from tourist trap gift shops; blood stained t-shirts living a second life as spill rags; a ream of polaroids.

The photos spill over the ground like an old film reel. An image of Dean’s half-closed eye off center and out of focus with the flash glaring off Sam’s bare shoulder and the agitated, amused angle of his mouth. An image of Dean back in focus with a grin and a thrown up peace sign over the canvas of Sam’s back. An image closer in on Sam’s back, the jaggedy crescent bite mark that was still red and purple and weeping at the time. An image of Dean, farther away, the length of his forearm all the way down as he holds the camera at the farthest distance of his reach with one hand and hooks down the edge of his collar with the other. An image of their matching scars. 

Sam stops looking at what he’s pulling out and just starts ripping it into the open. Fast food wrappers and bullet casings, spare change and bottles of holy water. The slick negative space underneath his tongue seizes tartly the way it does before he cries or vomits.

This clown car is his  _ life. _ Everything inside of it, Dean included.

The atlas is a mess. Maps missing, corners torn off, the names of beaches and towns crowded out under a scribbled chain of numbers that Sam doesn’t see the beginning or end of ripping through for a usable map of Assumption Parish. The publishing date is off, half the towns had barely been foundations whenever Dean first picked the road maps up, the only things accounted for are the historical buildings and the infrastructure that was being laid down at the time. 

Sam works with what he has.

He digs around the footwell for something to write with and turns up a chewed-over ballpoint.

A mark over the bank, the corner where the lead up to Angeline Hebert’s death was captured on a cold, grainy video. A mark over where the French Colonial that Adam  Beaumont  shares with Neil Nash will one day be built, a line of historic homes accounting for the spaces. He moves his hand to hover over the approximate, vacant space where the bar he last saw Dean in would be when something, a thing, that those two specific locations would have in common, occurs to Sam. 

Nothing to stop a man with a mind for it from coming straight up through the floor. 

-

Dean figures if he was in fighting shape it would have only taken him a few minutes to slip the cuffs with what he has on hand - a broken chain link on his bracelet and a fucking Can-Do Attitude. He’s rocking a hell of a headache but he can still count to ten and remember who the President is so he’s confident that he’ll live at least long enough to choke himself to death. The other himself. The one that is heading towards Sam. 

“Son of a bitch!” he shouts, fumbling the link off his bracelet. It  _ ting _ s and  _ ping _ s off of the metal pipes and into the moving water below. 

Dean kicks out at the railing in front of him,  _ kicks and kicks and kicks,  _ screaming and unseating the metal pole off the grating, cracking the rusting bolt heads. 

Neil Nash stares at him vacantly. 

Dean settles down slowly, breathing heavily with his head throbbing.

This is what he gets. 

For the lying and the mis-truthing. Probably for some other stuff too. Definitely some other stuff. Neil Nash was dead before they crossed the invisible line on the map into town. He wonders if this was all already going to happen, if fate exists. 

He groans to himself. 

It’s not over yet.

Neil Nash died with his suit jacket on, like he was coming home from work, maybe even the same night Angeline Hebert died. Dean kicks him over at a stretch, extended at the uncomfortable invert angle of his shoulder, the trick one that’s always looking for an excuse to jump out of the cradle. He checks his pockets and his limp sleeves, turns out a spare glasses case. 

“You beautiful bastard,” Dean lets go of a tight breath. “ _ Shit.  _ I take back all the things I thought about you.” 

The socket of his shoulder aches, creaks like the thick crust of ice on a Vermont lake once the sun starts to settle in for longer stretches in the spring. He grits his teeth, really,  _ really  _ doesn’t want to deal with relocating his shoulder before climbing a ladder and displacing a manhole cover but -

_ Pop.  _

“Fuck!” 

He kicks the case back towards himself, wriggles it back into his hands and it’s better than he even could have imagined because this nerd keeps a glasses repair kit with his spare readers. 

Dean cackles to himself and it echoes around with that wheeling red light. It only stops when the manhole cover screeches off the atrium overhead. 

“Bad news, chuckles! Gotta skip dinner and dive right into dessert!” 

Dean scrambles, shoulder screaming and head pounding, and the blood soaked shifter lowers himself down the ladder. 

“Where is Sam?” he shouts loud enough to cover over the sound of the cuffs clicking. 

“Don’t worry about Sam.” There’s red running down the shifter’s face and in his hair,  _ Dean’s  _ face and hair, and it looks like he just  _ slaughtered  _ somebody with that gun in his hand. There’s a malicious light in his eye when he crosses back into Dean’s personal space. “I’m gonna take good care of him.” 

Dean grabs the gun, twists himself back into the solid mass of his own counterfeit chest to get the muzzle pointed away. He gouges backwards with a harsh dig of his good elbow, shouts out loud like the rage in his voice would be enough. 

The other him squeezes off two shots before Dean’s able to separate the gun from his fist. He opens up a rift between them, shoving off the rail with his legs. The other Dean sprawls, rolls, recovers with the Colt pointed square at Dean’s chest, Dean’s Taurus pointed square at his. 

They breathe heavily from opposite ends of the platform, the staircase downwards is behind Dean and the ladder upwards is behind the creature that looks exactly like him.

“You any good with that thing?” Dean snarks. The red light spirals around the underground and his vision swims, head pounding, shoulder throbbing, ears ringing from the last lingering note of the shot in the dark. The firearm feels light. Four rounds left, he figures. Three, maybe. 

“As good as you are,” the other Dean cuts back, the same tone and smug expression on his face. 

-

The sludge seeps into the holes in Sam’s soles, swamps up the insides of his tennis shoes as he cuts horizontally between two raised platforms. He winces more for the noise his foot makes  _ squish _ ing out of the murk than the sensation. 

Everything that isn’t this moment, everything that came before it doesn't feel real anymore. He’s hyper aware here, the feeling of the dank air on his skin, the light hairs on his forearms and over his shoulders standing on end. Everything was all leading up to this, surely. A series of elaborate events so immense and intertwined Sam would have to zoom out farther than he’s capable to see where it starts or where it’s going to end. 

What the fuck is he going to do without Dean? 

He survived losing Ms. Petrov and he is currently living through losing Jessica, but he has no fucking idea what he is going to do if Dean is gone. Which is ridiculous, he hasn’t even known this person a year - this fucking guy with his radio stations and his love affair with his car. People shouldn’t be like this, there’s no reason that this one other human being with his touch-starved hands and that fresh blood and adrenaline sweat smell should be able to dominate his field of vision like this.

The world was smaller before he met Dean. 

Sam’s up to his waist in raw sewage and if this isn’t love he really, honestly, doesn’t know what the fuck it is. 

It isn’t fair. Scares him more than anything else ever has. 

He’s had Dean’s blood on his hands and in his mouth. He wakes up every morning and the first thing that he sees is Dean’s face. 

Dean wants him like a taxidermist. Like a mortician. He wants Sam’s organs and bones. He wants the thing that keeps Sam’s heart beating. 

Sam wants to scream. 

Dean didn’t even fucking ask before he started nailing stakes into Sam’s body. He just took. Moved right in, like he owned the place - put his boots up on Sam’s consciousness and started picking the locks on his psyche. He took and he took and he  _ gave. _

Dean cracked open the horizon and showed him the absolute truths of the universe. Dean taught him how to be strong, how to defend himself. He’s made Sam laugh, harder than he thought he’d ever be able to again. He’s made Sam think, think about shit he already thought he had figured out. He’s given Sam an entire world. Dean has saved Sam’s life every day since they met and he’s never asked for anything in return except for everything that Sam has.

And you know what? He can fucking have it. Sam doesn’t care anymore, he’s too tired to fight it for one more second and Dean can  _ have him,  _ he just needs to be alive to collect. 

Two gunshots in the endless maze of pipes, Sam sprints down the sound, follows it towards shouting. 

An open pipe gushes a veil of clearer water, twigs and leaves zipping by through the steady rush. A haunting red light flashes in spirals on the other side, like a heartbeat. 

“You any good with that thing?” 

Dean. 

“As good as you are.” 

Sam pierces through the flowing drape, soaked through to the roots of his hair in an instant and he comes to a glowing red world on the other side. He’s below three figures on a grated platform - one of them is dead and it’s not Dean. 

The other two are Dean. 

“Don’t move!” His voice sounds like it’s coming from every direction, raining down over their heads above the noise of the rushing water. 

Two sets of glowing green eyes on him at once, surprised to see him.

“Sam!”

LeftDean points his gun at RightDean, RightDean points his gun at LeftDean, and Sam swings a wide arc with the muzzle of his firearm between the two, a fine tremor running down through to his trigger finger. His wet hair sticks in his eyes and he regrets all those times Dean offered to chop it off for him and he said no. 

“Sammy,” RightDean growls. “Sam, shoot him!”

“Not me, Sam,” LeftDean barks. “Shoot him!” 

The sewer is disgusting, looming around them from all sides and making it hard to see through the swampy dinginess. The smell is a physical presence, smoggy and foul. Sam spits runoff out of his mouth unconsciously and squints hard, blinking the stinging sweat and sewer steam out of his eyes. 

He holds the gun the way that Dean taught him to when he wades forward, closer to the lower platform with the steep spiraling staircase. They look the same, pinning each other down with arms outstretched and blood on their faces and Sam doesn’t have a clear shot from below. Jittery and shifting, twitchy - they spat back and forth.

“It’s a shifter, Sam!”

“He doesn’t even look like me, Sam, c’mon!” 

Sam is out of breath vaulting the railing onto the platform, filthy, sweating, soaked. He glares up in the darkness, tries to make out anything useful in the lighthouse beam of red.

“Both of you put the guns down! Now!” 

“He’s not gonna put his gun down!” they shout in tandem. 

“Shoot him, Sam!” 

“No, Sam! Shoot him!”

Sam grimaces with his teeth bared. As if one Dean wasn’t loud enough. 

RightDean glances between LeftDean and Sam. LeftDean remains steady on RightDean. 

Sam fixes his stance against LeftDean. “You’re not Dean.” 

He sees the smile split across RightDean’s face out of the peripherals of his vision, hears him crow out a laugh. “Yeah, fuck you!”

“You better watch your mouth, Dean,” the thing shifts his mannerisms and posture, less pleading and more independent. He still has the gall to look smug, eyes darting all over the way that Dean’s do when he’s trying to pull something out of his ass. “I know all sorts of things that could get you into a lot of trouble.” He takes a step backwards.

“Do and you’re dead.” 

Sam takes three steps forward, makes it to a metal staircase before the shifter cracks a halting bark. “I’ll shoot him, Sam!” 

“He’s not gonna shoot me, Sam!” 

“Shut the fuck up!” Sam is out of breath, finally to the top of the stairs onto the platform. He paces forward and the Dean that isn’t Dean retreats backwards at a parallel position, stays facing forward with his pistol pointed at Sam’s Dean. Three points of a triangle. Something has to break. 

Dean’s face reads like a novel sometimes. When he’s talking about light subjects, his favorite movies and bands he’s seen live while rolling from corner to corner of the country. Sam has been practicing reading Dean’s thoughts in the twist of his lips and the creases in his brow, thought that he might be an expert. But he has never seen this. 

The shifter sneers with his mouth, glares back over to connect with the real Dean. “Knew it was gonna be you.”

The decision that Other Dean makes is a cold, white flash in his eye. 

The moment exists on the point of a needle. Everything tilts sideways in slow motion when the Shifter starts to twist and Dean, who can unravel the story from the other side of the map of the creature’s expression, is already moving, lunging. 

Worse than the worst nightmare Sam has ever had, he can’t even move as it happens. 

The image of Dean pointing a gun right at his heart. 

The other image of Dean lurching to get in front of the gun pointed at Sam’s heart. 

“No!” Sam’s voice echoes off the pipes, reverberates from the ceiling and walls all around them, echoing far into the distance of the tunnels with the acoustics of a pipe organ before the crack of gunfire snuffs it out completely. 

Sam pulls the trigger, again and again, screams with a fury that could wilt iron but when it’s over everything has still already happened. 

A numb, faraway thought. 

He’s finally killed something. 

-

If you’re ever experiencing a serious medical emergency in rural Louisiana and your only resources are an overstocked medical kit packed into a tackle box and a motel bathroom then the first thing you’re going to want to do is get as sterile as possible as fast as possible. This is not an operating room. You are not a trauma surgeon. You’re just a fucking kid that needs to pay attention. It’s gotta be clean. Anything grimy, greasy, or soaked in sewage has got to go. 

Wash your hands.

The best thing to do is to run a bath, keep lukewarm water running and have a sterile solution on standby to rinse down the trauma site. 

Wash your hands.

You’ve already checked for entry and exit wounds at this point, you did that before you dragged the other boy out of the sewer, and you can confirm that there’s still a bullet buried somewhere underneath his collarbone, maybe somewhere too close to that artery, maybe too close to remove in a motel bathtub in rural Louisiana.

Wash your hands. 

“Come here, stay with me here,” Dean ushers, gives him a firm pat on the side of the face that’s sloppy and off center, leaves a blood stain. He smiles like a loon, pupils blown wide and bright. “This is gonna be a funny story we tell one day.”

The water in the basin is orange like a hemorrhaging sunrise, an endless stream circling the drain.

You need to focus. 

You’re in a bathtub, stripped down to nothing but what you were born with and there’s a showerhead beating down warm water over you and it’s not even past 2:30am, there are still people drinking out there in the night. You’re over six feet tall and so is the boy underneath you, bloody and bruised up but he can kick just fine when you rock his shoulder back into the socket. You had to cut him out of his shirt and jeans and you’re crammed up together more intimately than the boy you actually did fuck earlier, the one that’s dead. 

“Look? See? I told ya.” Dean waves a lazy hand like it doesn’t make him woozy just to do it. “It’s not even that bad. It’s not even that deep. I’m gonna be fine. Nothing’s killed me yet.” 

Wash your hands.

You need to keep checking his heart rate - should be checking his blood pressure too but you can’t juggle around with the cuff, the forceps, the water, the bactine, and the needle all at the same time. He’s pale but his pulse is still strong but it is dropping.

You need to close up that hole, Sam. 

Bullet in or bullet out?

“Bullet in or bullet out?” He panics, looks to Dean, but Dean’s barely there. 

Any professional would recommend leaving the bullet in, getting Dean to a doctor, a real surgeon, a real physical therapist. IVs, anesthetics, transfusions, x-rays. 

You are all he has, Sam. He could have had anybody and he picked you. 

“Bullet out,” Dean grates. 

The bullet comes out in one piece, the smallest blessing on a nightmare night but Dean’s eyes roll over before Sam can show it to him. 

-

Dean comes back around almost an hour later, groaning from the bed and Sam is there, on his knees, making himself the first thing that he sees. 

“Oh,” Dean grouses, coughs and moans. “Ow, oh fuck.” 

“Dean?” Sam’s hands flutter around, not sure where to touch. He’s pulled himself back together as much as he could in the past forty five minutes, pants and shirts and shoes, just in case he needs to go to the pharmacy or the supermarket or - fuck, whatever Dean wants, whatever he needs. He has water bottles and pain killers already unpacked on the side table. 

“Sam?” Dean reaches and Sam clasps back, squeezes in so that Dean knows he’s there. 

“Hey, I’m here” His other hand on the soft line over Dean’s ribs. “Jesus, Dean. I’m here.” 

The pained creases on Dean’s face smooth out and he relaxes all over, squeezing Sam’s hand. He breathes in a relieved sigh and Sam feels the tension break in his stomach. 

“Holy fuck,” he splutters, something between a laugh and a sob wrenching out of his chest. “I thought that you were dead. I thought…I thought you were gone.” 

“Listen to me,” Dean says, serious and pale and beautiful with wide, dark, open eyes shining in the lamplight. “Nothing is ever going to take me away from you.” 

Sam kisses Dean. 

Has to. 

Couldn’t have done anything else in the moment if he had a thousand years to consider his options. He surges forward with his hands on Dean’s neck, his jaw. 

Dean makes a surprised noise in the back of his throat - Sam comes in too hot and angles his mouth in too hard at first but the lips underneath of his relax in a warm instant. 

It’s different from every other kiss that Sam’s had before in his life - Dean gasps Sam’s breath from his mouth like he needs it more than Sam does, comes to clutching back at Sam with a groan that hurts. 

They part in a separation of sticking lips and bewildered expressions and now that the instant is over Sam realizes in a freezing wash how much he just gambled on that kiss. 

The whole car and everything in it. 

Dean’s face is open wide, soft and mystified like he’s starry and disbelieving. That Sam would give him this, maybe. That Sam would admit it with his mouth. 

He’s never felt more tender and exposed than in this moment. Larger than a want, a dysfunctional aching need, overshadowing the smoldering, a word from Dean could crush him into an absolute oblivion. Dean could kill him, right here, right now. 

Dean looks right at him, opens his mouth, and says, “I’m your brother, Sam.” 

Which isn’t funny. 

Sam thinks it might be the worst joke Dean’s told the entire time that they’ve known each other - the months that Dean has spent staring at him and making cracks. And the timing? 

What a ridiculous thing to say. 

What a ridiculous…What…

“What?” 

Dean isn’t laughing.

Sam’s lips are numb. Every spot where they were pressed together a moment ago is burning: his palms, his forearms, the scalding handprint over the width of his throat and threading up over the cradle of his skull. The tip of his tongue. 

His mouth is open when he shakes his head a little, a quake of a movement. 

The thread of assumptions that bound the entire story together begins to unravel around his ears. Slowly at first, one stiff concept at a time, and then it shatters all over in cascades. He feels unspun all at once, a mummy twisting out of a shroud - a fuse lit at one end that sparks and burns, fizzing and whizzing around and around in a ringing, railing whine that starts to swell in symphony. 

Dean is saying something, he thinks, can’t hear anything over the noise of a thousand moments playing directly onto his face like a screeching projector reel - the car, the gun, the smile, the smell, the blood, the books, the voice, the journal. 

Mother Mary, full of grace. 

Please forgive me for what I have done to your  _ sons.  _

There is a knock on the door. 


	6. Somewhere

In the very center of the universe there is a star that glows hot and bright and gold, and everything orients itself around that light and it is shining directly on Dean’s face when Sam looks at him on a dark July barely-morning and kisses him full on the mouth. 

His hands are warm and broad along the pulse point of Dean’s neck and the hinge of his jaw and Dean’s chest hurts so bad he can feel every beat of his heart like a physical blow as it rockets away. There’s an earnestness, a desperation and he  _ wants  _ Dean, more than anyone else ever has. 

Sam is  _ kissing  _ him and Dean is boiling, roiling over inside with a primal satisfaction - something selfish and twisted that gloops to the sides of his pleasure center. A purr, a satiated beast that has never settled fully until this moment. 

Sam needs him. 

Dean opens his mouth, sighs at the thought alone and sinks into the plush absolution. For one second nothing else matters. Not his shoulder or his other shoulder, or his head. He almost lost Sam again but instead he has this. 

When Sam drags away Dean’s eyes are still closed and he misses the warmth and the attention immediately. 

He opens his eyes and Sam is there, the way that he has been for almost a year. This blank, blind trust on his face, something boyish and innocent still persistent in the glow of his cheeks despite the paleness and the blood. He looks shy, open, loving. 

The bullet wound twists in his chest, stabs. 

“I’m your brother, Sam.” 

The openness is the first thing that edges away in Sam’s expression. “What?” he huffs, smile waning slowly because he doesn’t believe it at first.

It’s that imaginary noise again, the clicking and ticking that Dean can hear when Sam starts to piece a mystery together. His eyes drift away and so does his expression, mouth parting open again in a cloudy haze. 

Dean has to hold a hand to his own chest, right over the hole in the center, because if he doesn’t he’s afraid that he's going to split right down the middle. He’s too scared to think anything. 

This is the moment that all of that practicing was for. 

The knock on the door rattles both of them, unexpected and abrupt before Sam can finish the thought all the way. Dean flinches, gasps out loud when he pulls the stitches and Sam is already gone, just a vacuum where that tender look was a delirious second ago. 

He seizes the excuse to remove himself from the moment with both fists, crossing to the door and cracking it open before Dean can even protest. Through the gap in the frame, underneath the golden bridge of the locked chain Dean can see the clear cut image of a tall man with a thick, dark beard and a shock of light on his face, like he recognizes Sam. 

Sam closes the door again before the man can say, “Wai - ” 

He turns back to the other side of the room, where Dean is watching him like he’s a bomb diffusing expert that just snipped a wire. 

The pounding on the door rattles the placard hanging from the handle. 

“Sam.” Dean’s voice sounds like an admission of guilt. 

“That’s your father,” Sam says because he’s smart, Dean knew he was smart. “And you're my brother and that’s  _ my _ father.” 

“Sam.” 

He’s picking up speed now, an avalanche building mass through cracks and spills as it churns up a thunder. Dean can see the map laid out on Sam’s exhausted face, the years and the journey and realizations. 

“That - that,” Sam stammers, clears his tight throat, can’t keep the tremor out of his voice or his pointing hand. “ _ That  _ is the man that left me in Rochester?” 

The pounding again - an, “Open the door, Sam!” from the other side that seems to pull some sort of trigger because Sam comes to life. Dean winces like he’s going to be able to get himself upright and over to the other side of the room before Sam can do what’s already winding up in his elbow.

When Sam rips the door open he’s tall, taller than John Winchester and twice as angry. There’s an entire lifetime clenched into the very center of his fist and Dean wonders if John saw this one coming too when Sam fuckin’ decks him. 

“ _ Sam!”  _

But it’s too late. It’s always been too late. It was too late four years ago and it would be too late tomorrow. Into the endless wall of the night, Sam is gone. There are thousands and thousands of roads that could lead anywhere. 

Dean clutches at the bullet wound, reaches with his other hand for something that was never really there. 

-

The type of shit they give you a Bronze Star for, you would not believe. With Valor, no less. 

Like it took valor to see a nineteen old from Greenwood County, South Carolina get his legs knocked out from underneath of him. His name was John, Johnny - and the boys would call him ‘Draws’ on account of his deep south drawls and his polka dotted drawers and the way he draws a gun, and also on account of there being too many god damned Johns on this task force. 

Draws has brown hair and brown eyes and he’s streaked all over with green when he looks over his shoulder, waist deep in water with more coming down all around them, and he says with fat, twanging vowels, “Rifles, I tell ya’, first thing I’m doin’ when I get home? Airin’ out my gotdam feet. I ain’t never wearin’ shoes again wh - ” 

The world goes sideways all at once. Suspended in a single humid moment are the two of them. Draws has this half a smile on his face, dip cammed down deep into the well of his lip with a tarp pulled tight around his neck like a cloak. He’s weightless in that half-stepping place before all of him trips some sort of pressure plate. And then everything is different, louder and more painful. It’s frothing up water from all sides, tinted red around the foaming edges. 

Draws must swallow some of that dip when he’s screaming because he starts coughing and hacking up from deep in his belly, face going red and the imaginary space where his ankles used to be going redder. 

Hell is three days in South Vietnam trying to keep a nineteen year old from Greenwood County, South Carolina alive. 

He carries Draws the way he would later carry his children - on his back in a sling. The boy turns pale and ashy in the humidity and heat, a constant rattling prayer tumbling from his cracked lips. He cries for God and his mother. John knows from the smell of him when the rain breaks for a few muggy hours in the morning that they aren’t going to be able to salvage much of what is left below the waist - but he fights for the both of them. He fights for Draws’ mother and for his god, too. With his teeth bared and his muscles burning, rain in his eyes and blood in his hair, he fights. 

It’s eight miles to the extraction point. He doesn’t get them there pretty or clean, but he fucking gets them there. 

Johnny ‘Draws’ Dorsey is discharged with a Purple Heart and ten less toes than he started with.

John Winchester gets a Bronze Star and the word ‘Corporal’ in front of his name. He’d been known for sharpshooting before but somebody that sits in an air conditioned office must have been impressed with his sweat and they give him three more boys to watch over - a nineteen year old from Little Rock, a twenty year old from Macon County, and an eighteen year old from San Antonio. When he brings them all back in one piece they give him two more. 

Five set of eyes every morning, and they’re just fucking kids. They have questions - good ones, stupid ones, ones that aren’t even John’s job to answer. He’s a year younger than the oldest of them. 

He puts on  _ Creedence  _ in the chopper on their way down to the ground and gives them each a firm smack upside the head to remind them to keep  _ smart  _ before gesturing them off one by one by one by one by one into the wet and the grey. And then he follows out after them. He counts them on the way back in, one, two, three, four, five, closes the door. 

He’s good enough at counting to five that they tell him to do it again. And again. 

John learns of his reputation as a hardass from a superior officer while standing with a stiff back. Tells him that there’s a rumor going around that John’s got eyes in the back of his head and a black hole where his sense of humor used to be. He’s known as a man who does what he says and says less than he knows. 

It’s another year before he gets a Purple Heart and a discharge of his own, shrapnel in his gut and swelling in his brain. The US Government says, “Thanks for coming out!” and sends him back to Kansas. He hits American Soil hard enough to knock the wind out of his lungs. 

Not a single one of his boys makes it through the rest of the war without him. He writes to Draws, hears back from his mother with a written account of a memorial service that John missed by months. 

Completely alone, John wanders the world with a chip on his shoulder and a look in his eye like he’s  _ hoping _ somebody calls him out on it. 

Mary Campbell calls him out on it. 

They have far too much in common for his liking at first. Eyes in the back of her head and a black hole where her sense of humor should be. She’s got the face of an angel but there’s something cold and hard behind her expressions. She looks right through him when she finally gets around to looking at him at all, tells him exactly what she thinks his problem is.

“You think you’re so smart? You think you’ve got it all figured out?” She stands with her arms crossed over her stomach with one hip popped out, the way she’ll stand for every argument they’ll have for the rest of her life. “You don’t know shit, John.” 

God, he loves fighting with her. He would take an argument with Mary Campbell over clean water and warm food every day of the week and twice on Sundays. She’s at her most beautiful and fearsome when she’s angry. She lights up, heartbeat warm and glowing off the apples of her cheeks. She’s so stubborn - maybe as stubborn as he is, and he can’t help the wash of awe and adoration that flows through him every time she makes him work just a little bit harder. 

He asks her to be Mary Winchester. She makes him wait for her answer on his knees. 

“It is a good name,” she considers with a smile, eyes molten and gold. It’s the name that they give to their two sons. It’s the name on her gravestone. 

It’s not the name that he jots down on Sammy’s medical history when he’s checking into Strong Memorial Hospital.

He dreams of different worlds upon occasion. Against his will, stolen away by troubled sleeps, he’ll imagine worlds where things went differently and his sons hate him for a whole other set of reasons. 

A nurse had a couple of follow up questions. 

It was a week straight spent in the hospital - he slept in the car in the parking lot in the scant few hours that he could manage between interviews and counselors, “Mr. Wesson, we’re just trying to do what’s best for Sam.” His mind drifted back to his first born, upstate sleeping in the spare room of a munitions expert who had initially only agreed to keep an eye on the boy for an afternoon. 

John has Sam Winchester's birth certificate and social security card, tax records claiming him as a dependent in 1984 and photos of him as a baby. If he handed any of it over they would find Dean. John couldn’t lose both of them. He could not lose both of Mary’s sons. 

Dean never forgives him. 

He raises that boy the same way he raised the other five in Vietnam, trying to keep him  _ smart _ . You feed an angry young man a strict diet of purpose to keep him out of trouble, but it won’t do anything to make him love you. 

He saw it in the boy’s face every day for fifteen years and he can see it now, underneath the paleness and the flop sweat, the frosty expression that John’s sure curdles the stomachs of men who didn’t teach him how to shave. He’s in a bad way, blood on the bedspread and blood on the towels, John sees the discarded set of first aid supplies strewn open across the floor around his knees.

“Dean,” John grits out, tasting metallic iron on his tongue.

“Your fucking timing is unbelievable. What the hell are you doing here?” It’s manic, delirious. He moves like he thinks that he’s going to make it to the threshold. 

John closes the door behind himself. “Your face was on the news." 

“No,” Dean bleats, obstinate disagreement because his face was absolutely on the news. ‘Suspect at large’ the marquee said, underneath security footage of what was unmistakably John’s firstborn. “Sam,” he says. 

Sam is gone. Sam has been gone. There wasn’t a chance to catch him once he got going. 

“You need to get horizontal immediately.” He’s too pale for John’s liking, ashy and gulping like a surfaced fish. 

“I need to go find Sam.” Clenching his teeth, the tendons in his neck stand out against the pale, sweaty skin. A broken record with this kid. 

“You  _ need,”  _ John emphasizes deeply, hands up under Dean’s shoulders and hustling him back towards the bed, “To rest. You look like shit, Dean.” 

He succumbs slowly, a lost and overwhelmed look on his face that’s too familiar from John’s nightmares, the day that he had to come back to face the music. A wounded sort of sound punches out of him and when he turns his gaze onto John it is scorching. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” he demands again, breathier than he intended, John’s sure. 

“I was in the neighborhood. Thought you might have been in a jam.” 

A half truth. 

“You were trying to find Sam.” 

Alright, a third of the truth. 

“I found Sam, alright.” John touches his cheekbone where it’s going to be a lucky blue color before the sun rises all the way. The roots of his teeth throb. Hell of a right hook. “Don’t worry about him. I don’t blame him for not wanting to be in a room with me.”

The expression on Dean’s face ices down in a cold front. He glances to the door. The sharpness dilutes around the edges of his eyes and he scrubs a hand over his mouth when he looks away. 

Dean allows himself to be pushed back down to the bed, grating his esophagus over as he goes.

“Let me see this.” John isn’t asking, peels back the layers over the bullethole. The stitches are sewn in a neat set, even width and uniform spacing. Not too tight, amatures will forget to make room for the swelling and pull ‘em too tight. The knot at the end is like a signature - the one he taught Dean as a child. The back of his head is cleaned and patched precisely. Picture could be in a medical textbook. “Damn. It’s good work.”

“Kid’s a whizz at goddamn everything,” he grunts when John tapes the gauze back in place. 

“What’s he like?” 

Dean scrubs his hand over his mouth again, smothers over his lips and holds his palm there. 

It’s his right as a son to hate him. Sam’s too, wherever he got off to. John doesn’t think that he’s going to answer until he does. “You two woulda been at each other’s throats in minutes.” 

He chuckles mistily and his cheek aches. 

“He’s…” Dean looks burnt out. His gaze searches the room around them. The two duffles, the suit jacket slung over the back of the chair, the shoes next to the door. “He’s more than I ever imagined. Of everything. Too smart, too stubborn. Drives me crazy. That he’s…real.”

John says nothing.

Dean’s eyes droop, focus blurring away. He fills the silence distantly. “You were right, you know.” 

He usually is, but that’s rarely good news. 

“He didn’t remember me.” Dean looks like a little kid with beseeching eyes and rumpled hair, accusing in the same way he imagines Draws must have been when he finally met whatever god he’d been praying for. “Is this what you thought was going to happen?” 

John considers the question. 

What did he think was going to happen? 

He thought he was going to be a mechanic in Lawrence, Kansas. 

Fate is a comet piercing the layers of the atmosphere with a trail so brilliant and beautiful that it feels poetic drawing closer. The nearer that it gets to the surface of the earth the more that the point of impact feels like a prophecy. John doesn’t much subscribe to the concept of destiny but he does believe in inevitabilities. A bullet out of a gun knows where it’s going before you do, objects in motion, and Dean has always been in motion. Sam, too, for a long time. On the other side of the map, feet on the streets like he had somewhere more important to be. 

“You stealing the car was a surprise,” he concedes. 

Dean coughs and it might be a laugh. John’s not sure where he got his sense of humor from. Trying to make Sam smile, maybe. 

“Did you burn the body?” he breaks the moment, back to business. 

“Had a couple more pressing matters to attend to at the time.” Dean grinds out.

“Yeah, well, I got bad news,” John’s knees crack when he straightens up and feels the puffiness beginning to set in around the socket of his eye. “You’re gonna live. I’ll go clean up. Gotta clear out of town after.”

“You’re  _ leaving? _ ” he demands, sounding awfully indignant for somebody that hasn’t returned one of John’s calls in nearly five years. 

“I missed you, too, Dean.” He packs him up, ice and anti-inflammatories and his cellphone with the 13 voicemails. John has a couple twenties in his pocket, folds them into a take-out menu and leaves that too. “I’ve got to go see a lady about a gun. ‘Sides, you seem to have everything under control around here.” 

“What?” Dean bursts. “Sam is gone! I’ve been shot!” 

“You’re gonna live,” he repeats on his way to the door. He never took his jacket off so it’s quick work leaving. “And Sam will be back.”

“You don’t know that!”

John snorts. That is funny. 

The look on that boy’s face when he closes the door, you’d think John was shuttering down a dungeon or sending him off to war. 

And yeah, John guesses that is what it feels like to be that spot on the ground right where the comet is going to hit. 

-

Sam is running, doesn’t know what else to do with his body other than do what he’s always done. 

What the  _ fuck  _ is even happening?

Like that first day in the motel room but a thousand times more twisted and Sam is even more exhausted. Like that first night, the very first time that he was alone curled up in a hospital bed at Strong Memorial, only darker. 

Nothing has ever been normal before but at least it used to make sense if he sat and thought about it long enough. It was a simple story - the story about a lonely boy being saved by another lonely boy. He thought it was a simple story. He’d really believed it. 

What was the point of all that studying and testing and fucking learning that Ms. Petrov told him was so important and what the  _ fuck  _ was the point of getting a full ride to Stanford if he’s still this  _ fucking stupid? _

He’s crying but he’s trying to ignore it and just keep his body moving, keep breathing. He cuts down off the pavement and into the tall, wet grass just in case anyone tries to follow him, though he seriously doubts that motherfucker would want to and Dean’s in no shape. His shoes stick in the mud and it wets the cuffs of his jeans up to the ankles. 

‘Angry’ doesn’t even begin to describe it, such a small word in comparison to the writhing rage searing through Sam’s chest, roaring in his ears as he breaches the treeline on the other side of the median. ‘Humiliated’ is a drop in the bucket. 

His knuckles are swollen and black-purple and it figures that John Winchester was a hard headed son of a bitch. Sam’s hand might be broken but that’s what he gets for these hot headed tantrums, those spur-of-the-moment decisions that keep getting him into hot water like cracking an answering machine down over Mr. Petrov’s head or deciding to dedicate his life to hunting down a demonic monster or kissing his brother. 

That everything can be stripped away from him time after time - it has to have a reason. There has to be a punchline to the joke at some point, it can’t just be this insane spiral with no trajectory, eventually it has to be fucking funny,  _ right _ ?

He stumbles to his knees. Who would even be laughing if it was? 

The sob tears through him, ripped from the deepest and darkest pit in his chest, the place where he hides all things. Why doesn’t he get to keep anything? He doesn’t understand anymore, nothing makes sense, none of it. 

He mourns twenty three years in seven minutes.

When Sam comes down from the height of the emotions he just feels vacant, sitting in a damp spot covered over by sawgrass blades. Alone. Actually Alone. Small underneath a daunting roll of thunderclouds, the types of storms that hurtle from one side of the endless frame of landscape to the other on late summer nights. 

Exhausted, he has bared himself vulnerable too many times in one evening. A savaged dog, he needs to limp somewhere dark and cold where he can hide from the sun and lick his wounds. 

The sky growls thunder and Sam swipes his nose on his sleeve and takes stock. 

After so many years of running away from people pretending to be his family Sam thinks that he should be better at it but after turning out his pockets he only has thirteen dollars and a coupon from a grocery chain in a different state for canned soup. He hasn’t grown up, he’s just gotten older. 

Some hick bar, some town, somewhere - Sam knows by now that they all look the same and this one isn’t busy enough to cover up the greasy scarring on the tall pub table tops. There’s plenty of space to spread out from one end of the room to the other. 

By the time he stumbles in through the threshold with his busted fist jammed down in his pocket and his puffy eyes looking downwards Sam feels human enough. The rain starts behind him and nobody looks up when he comes into the light. 

There’s a scattered handful of patrons between one wall and another and everyone seems to have been set up for a stretch. Enough people to churn up a chatter underneath the music. There’s a set of construction workers that have been off shift for long enough to get shitty, slurring blue jokes to one another with bright red faces. Some old gals gab back and forth over long island iced teas, long nails and drawn on eyebrows. A slip of a girl with big hair and a denim jacket, tapping her foot along to the music while she scrolls over her options at the jukebox.

“Last call,” the bartender informs him. 

The chalkboard mounted over the glass-backed bar declares Tuesday’s special to be cider so that is what Sam orders. He drinks, twists his mouth down at the sweetness of it but it gives him anything to do other than watch the door over his shoulder in the mirror.

He wonders if this is even the worst night of his life. 

He catches his own eye by accident.

He wonders what Jessica would think of him now. Would she still want to kiss him if she knew where his mouth has been? 

His name is Sam Winchester and he is twenty three years old. There’s mud in his hair and his throat is sore from screaming and crying and giving head. He killed something tonight. He has a brother. 

He doesn’t want to think about it. For five minutes. Doesn’t want to think about Dean or his father or his hand or what he’s going to do next. 

This has been the longest fucking night of his entire life and it’s not too much to ask for one drink to pull himself together and pretend to be normal - for five minutes. 

He scans the room in the reflection behind the bottles, sees that the construction workers have phased into a more somber level of drunkenness, professing profound affections aloud and swigging on beers. The ladies have begun to lull, checking their purses and yawning into their batting hands. There’s a litter of lemon rinds and sugar packets laid out between them. The girl with the hair and the jacket sips on two cocktail straws unsteadily, chuckling to herself as she gouges over another page in the display case. 

She feeds the jukebox a quarter and punches in two buttons. 

The box whirrs up, a mechanical arm underneath a glass pane craning over a line of vinyls, dropping to queue in her selection. She grins and glows to herself, content and buzzing as she leans up against the wall and waits for the needle to find the music. 

Sam breathes and feels a little softer, at least, knowing there’s somebody out there having a nice night. 

The song comes into the vacant airspace on a gallop,  _ demanding  _ attention before sliding away in a spiraling drift _.  _ Back again a heartbeat later, a crunchy guitar lick that leaks away in anticipation, laying it out like a train track to welcome in a snaring underdrum. 

Sam snorts into the rim of his pint glass. 

When was the last time he heard  _ Barracuda _ ? 

-

“Where are you? Call me back. Asshole.”

“Dean. Seriously. I’m getting worried. The car is here. Call me back.” 

“Pick up your phone, Dean. How am I supposed to know you’re okay if you don’t pick up your phone?” 

“If you’re dead I am going to be so angry at you. You have no idea. I will never forgive you.”

“Dean! Pick up your fucking phone!” 

“I need you to pick up the phone. I need. I need you to pick up. Dean.” 

“Where are you!” 

“What the fuck, Dean? If you’re not dead I’m gonna kill you!” 

“Please don’t be dead. I really need you to not be dead. I…I really need you.” 

“Are you going to haunt me? If you are dead. Are you going to stay and haunt me?” 

“Because I’ll fucking kill you myself, Dean! I’m not joking! If you aren’t dead I’ll finish the job!”

“Don’t be dead. I don’t know what I would…You…you can’t leave me alone out here. I’m sorry. For pushing. I don’t….need any of that other stuff. If you’re okay. I don’t need…I just need you. To be alive. Dean. I need you to be okay. Please.” 

Dean saves the voicemails, one after another. 

4:33am. 

He doesn’t think that he’s ever been more exhausted in his life. This must be what the dirt in the graveyards feel like. Every piece of him hurts, down to the individual cells, and he is battered like he’d been left on the shore during a hurricane. He thought that it would be easy to fall asleep after the day and the night that he had but the pain is keeping him up nearly as much as the thunder is. A restless spirit. It’s dark out the window. 

No more maps. 

There’s no way to know where Sam is anymore. He’s completely in the wind, somewhere that Dean won’t be able to find him. If he’s smart about it - and he would be smart about it - they’ll never see each other again. 

Dean’s lips still feel static. 

Could just be the blood loss. 

He lets his eyes drop closed. 

He doesn’t know what’s next. There is nothing up his sleeve. There is no man behind the curtain. No ace. Sam is gone and Dean Winchester is officially cashed. 

He took a bullet for Sam. He would have died, gladly, with a smile on his face. If Sam doesn’t know by now it’s never going to happen. Dean doesn’t have anything else to give. 

He aches. Inside and out. 

He has to call the front desk in the morning. During business hours. The thought of there being a tomorrow exhausts him. 

The rain on the windows is a lullaby, rhythmic and constant. 

He’s nearly, finally, almost there, so close to being drifted all the way away to somewhere a little more restful when the door cracks back open.

He jumps and flinches, alert and clawing. 

Sam is here. 

Soaked all the way through from the rain, chest heaving up against the thin fabric of his shirt and face colored up pink like he’s been sprinting. His dark hair is plastered down on his brow, around his ears and over the back of his neck and his eyelashes are sticking together. He takes up all the space in the room when he looks at Dean. 

“It was you,” he says. 

Dean can’t breathe. 

Sam nods, a small movement that gains momentum like he’s agreeing with himself the more that he takes Dean in, sees him across the flickering storm light. “The toy car and the mixtape and the money that I found in my sock drawer at Stanford.” 

Dean thinks he must be dreaming, must be dead, because Sam is  _ here. _

When Sam raises a hand it’s to gesture pitifully, with crepey fingers, into his chest, touching the spot where Dean aches too. “You were always there.” 

“Sam?” Is that you? 

“I missed you.” Sam chokes, a tremor under his lip. “So much.”

“Sam.” Dean hates the broken, pleading note of his own voice,  _ needy _ . He tries to move but there’s not even fumes. 

Sam comes to him. 

Breaking, crying, cracked all the way open down the raw center. Sam comes to his knees next to the bed, head and arms and torso in Dean’s lap, soaking through his clothes and the sheets and the carpet. He comes back to Dean with his twisted hands turned up at the palm, begging to be held. 

Dean is on top of him, over him as his torso is squeezed in Sam’s arms. Dean squeezes back, a fistful of sodden shirts and wet hair. 

“You don’t know, Sam,” Dean gasps for air and it hurts so much. “You have no idea.” 

“Oh my god,” are the words that come spluttering out of Sam’s mouth and into Dean’s battered chest. “Oh my god, I forgot. I can’t  _ believe -  _ I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, Dean. I forgot that it was you.” 

Dean looks at him,  _ looks at him, _ can’t believe that Sam doesn’t know. 

“Sam. It was  _ you. _ ”

Altogether, pressed up like this, Sam and Dean Winchester take up less than three cubic feet in a universe that is endlessly spreading at the edges.

Sleep comes to Dean first. 

The relief and the adoration wash him away into a warm, dreamless place that smells like Sam’s hair. Sam sags and follows afterwards, unspooling in a collapsed seated position with his chest and shoulders spread over the comforter between them. Their breathing falls into sync in the dark.

-

Pen marks and marker bleeds, a ringing cloud of buzzing calculations consuming the entire Pacific Ocean. Arrows and doodles and dots and drags, tattered edges and browned blood stains.

Sam sees the story of his life from above and it is, predictably, a mess. 

“See here?” Dean tries to point with his elbow, both arms slung up in repurposed t-shirts because he can’t control himself when it comes to wanting to do something with his hands and it keeps agitating his shoulders. Cross legged and in his boxer briefs, Sam can see the soft fuzz and strong, sturdy muscle of his calves and thighs. He’s rolling on two Vicodin and a good mood. “That’s the time I stole a Chrysler and drove down from Maine. Worst storm of the year that night. I had to pull off the side of the road it got so bad - knew I was never going to make it before you went to bed but…” I didn’t care. I needed to see you. 

Spread out on the ground, Sam lays on his stomach with the full atlas laid out between them and his busted hand propped up, ice pack melting a dark pool into his grey shirt. He kicks his bare feet and touches the mark over Freeport, Maine. “How far - ”

“Four hundred ninety miles.” 

He sees how many times they were so close, how many times that Dean was just outside the window with his face pressed up against this glass. How many times they passed in the night, shoulders brushing. 

He looks up and Dean is already staring at him. 

“Are you gonna kiss me again?”

“God, Dean!” Sam startles and flushes immediately, has to hide his eyes and his face under his hair. He already knew that Dean wasn’t going to let the opportunity to rag on him slip away, just thought he might have the decency to wait a full twenty four hours before setting in. 

“No, I mean…” 

Sam hesitates. Looks up. 

Dean is on his knees now. “Like… Are you?” 

Sam can’t believe him. That he exists, for one - that he’s never leaving, for two - that he is so unabashedly offering Sam even more, everything, before they’ve even had their morning coffee. 

“Maybe,” he tests. “If you do something worth kissing over.” 

Dean snorts and laughs, winces. “I am not getting shot every time I want you to kiss me.” 

Dean is crazy, Sam realizes - not for the first time. Dean’s fucking insane and he  _ loves  _ Sam. A mind boggling amount. Since before he was born and then after he dies, too. 

Sam reaches with his left hand, handles a marker with the awkward cradle of his non-dominant hand and marks down a spot for the motel room where he gets to keep something.


End file.
